January 15, 2021 · 7:19 pm

Classroom Clownery (Not to be confused with Sean Clownery… He’s James Blond)

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See Dick?

See Jane?

See Sally?

See Dick run?

See Jane run?

See Sally…?   Wait a minute!  Why don’t I remember Sally?

Did Dick forget to feed Spot and Spot was forced to kill and eat Sally?

No…  I had Dick and Jane books in Kiddy-garter and they did have Sally in them.  And Spot never killed anyone.  But with all the running she did, Sally did not do anything memorable.  If my teacher, Miss Ketchum, had told the Spot eats Sally story, I’m sure I would’ve remembered Sally better and learned to read faster.

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But I actually did learn to read faster because there was a Cat in the Hat, and a Yertle the Turtle, and because Horton the elephant heard a Who, and a Grinch stole Christmas.  Yes, humor is what always did it for me in the classroom.  Dr. Seuss taught me to read.  Miss Mennenga taught me to read out loud.  And in seventh grade, Mr. Hickman taught me to appreciate really really terrible jokes.    And those are the people who twisted my arm… er, actually my brain… enough to make me be a teacher who taught by making things funny.  There were kids who really loved me, and principals who really hated me.  But I had students come back to me years later and say… “I don’t remember anything at all from my classes in junior high except when you read The Outsiders out loud and did all those voices, and played the Greek myth game where we had to kill the giants with magic arrows, and the stupid jokes you told.”  High praise indeed!

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I think that teaching kids to laugh in the classroom was a big part of teaching them how to use the language and how to think critically.    You find what’s funny in what you learn, and you have accidentally examined it carefully… and probably etched it on the stone part of your brain more memorably than any other way you could do it.  And once it’s etched in stone, you’re not getting that out again any time soon.

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Humor makes you look at things from another point of view, if for no other reason, then simply because you are trying to make somebody laugh.  For instance, do you wonder like I do why the Cat in the Hat is trying to pluck the wig off of Yelling Yolanda who is perched on the back of yellow yawning yak?  I bet you can’t look at those two pictures positioned like that and not see what I am talking about.  Of course, I am not betting money on it.  I am simply talking Iowegian… a totally different post.

But the point is, humor and learning go hand in hand.  It takes intelligence to get the joke.  Joking makes you smarter.  And that is why the class clowns in the past… the good and funny ones… not the stupid and clueless ones… were always my favorite students.

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January 14, 2021 · 9:56 pm

My Bookish Journey

My journey as a writer actually began in grade school. I was writing Star Trek-like comics from the time I was in the fourth and fifth grade, ten and eleven years old. I called my comics Zebra Fleet, about the last fleet in the Star League on the distant, far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy.

I started writing book-length stories in college, at Iowa State University. They weren’t all science fiction. They began to be more and more about the time and place where I grew up, Rowan, Iowa in the 1960s and 1970s They involved the people I knew there and then. My family, my friends, the people of Rowan, and random Iowegians. I based important characters on people I actually knew, mostly those I knew quite well. But I changed and swapped character details to hide their identities a little bit, and I gave them names that were mixed and matched and borrowed from the 1977 Ames, Iowa phone book. Dettbarn, Efram, Sumpter, Bircher, Clarke, MacMillan, White, and Murphy all came from there. Niland came from a famous alumni of the University of Iowa who played for the Dallas Cowboys.

In order to have food to eat and money to spend as an adult, I had to take my BA in English and add to it an MA in Education to get a job as a teacher. I took my closet full of nascent novels and moved to Texas where my dad’s job took my parents before I graduated college. There I added hundreds of characters who were perfect for Young Adult novels as I got to know real kids and learned about their real lives. I changed their names, details, and often cultures as I added them to my stories.

Other than a couple of shots in the dark as submissions of cartoons and manuscripts to publishers, I mostly kept my stories in the closet and focused more on teaching (which, to be fair, is also a form of story-telling.) I put my handful of rejection letters in the closet too.

But then, I got laid off for two years due to health and a wicked witch as a principal, and I spent my non-job-hunting time writing a novel about my science-fiction role-playing games with former students. It was called AeroQuest.

I managed to find a publisher for that book. But it was a bogus sort of experience. They paid me an advance of one dollar. Then they had me sign a seven-year contract in 2007. No editor or proofreader even worked for them. I basically had to edit and format the book myself. All they did is intentionally flub-up some titles and sections of text in the printed form. This was part of the master plan to get me to pay for an extensive fix to the mistakes they made. The only marketing they did was to send a notice for my over-priced paperback to the list of friends and relatives that they required me to make for them. Publish America is no longer in business. They were closed down by a class-action lawsuit from the authors they had tricked into paying them thousands of dollars for totally defective publishing services. Since I didn’t pay them any scam pennies, I didn’t get any of the money from the lawsuit. I only got my publishing rights back.

So, I went back to whole-heartedly teaching. Then, in 2012 I completed another manuscript that I thought was the best work that I had ever done. I submitted it to I-Universe publishers. They read it and loved it. As it turned out, they were in the process of being acquired by Penguin Books. They were the closest thing to a mainstream publisher that would entertain submissions by new and unproven authors like me.

They, of course, were offering a publishing package that included working with real editors and marketing personnel. But I had to go a bit into debt to swing the price. So, I was still paying someone to publish my book correctly. But, as a step in my author’s journey, it was invaluable. I got to work closely with an experienced editor who had previously worked for both MacMillan and Harcourt, two mainstream traditional publishers.

My book was given the stock cover you see here despite the cover requests I made and got approved. My original ask was apparently too expensive to print. There is no girl flying a kite in the story at all, let alone at night. It is a story about incompetent aliens trying to invade a small town in Iowa. I had requested a flying saucer with a kite flying behind it.

That first real publisher, though, made me into a real writer. The I-Universe marketeers got me listed as a winner of the Editor’s Choice Award. And they put that award and the Rising Star award on every paperback copy they printed. Everyone who read the book seemed to really like it. They set me up with this blog, space on their website for my book and bio, and they put me in touch with Barnes and Noble to talk about “meet the author” sessions to promote getting the book on their shelves. But a trip to the hospital with pneumonia and the end of the room on my Discover Card caused me to bring an end to my marketing campaign. I ended up with two five-star reviews and sixteen dollars-worth of royalties.

At this point in the story, temporarily stalled, I must start touting the part two of my essay for today. I should warn you, I have a lot more negative things to say about publishing next time.

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January 13, 2021 · 6:12 pm

When One Door Closes…

I confess I do not know anything when it comes to marketing my books. I have worked at it hard now for the past six years. I have managed to make about five dollars a month this year… up from nothing while spending twenty dollars a month on various marketing services. So, by my limited math skills, I am now losing only $180 a year,

I recently got another excellent review on a book I feel good about having written, and I think it bodes well that when someone who actually read the book, a belief that I have because it is a verified-purchase review, seems to confirm that it really is a good book. At the very least, it really did connect with this one reader.

I got a very unexpected boost from a fellow author and book-marketer on Twitter. I am the second of three authors featured in the blog post linked to below.

https://mmmoffamilyentertainment.com/2021/01/13/the-blogger-bookstore-day-12/

I don’t know exactly how this came about. I am not used to having success on Twitter from any quarter besides Twitter nudists and Twitter fans of Tom Hiddleston. She, as a WordPress blogger, doesn’t seem to be a member of either of those groups.

One of the books that the Blogger Bookstore highlighted was Laughing Blue, the book I had already chosen for my January free-book promotion. It will begin being offered for free on Friday of this coming weekend. That fact, combined with the way the blog has filled my Twitter notifications this morning may cause the promotion to reach more readers than any previous promotion has managed.

The other book highlighted in the blog post was my very best novel, Snow Babies.

That couldn’t have been a better door to be opened if I had written that post on the other blog myself.

So, as I was getting more and more depressed as my health worsens and the pandemic has been grinding more on more on my soul,, this door to possibilities opened.

Believe me, I appreciate it. It is timely.

More than once a new door has opened, letting light into my life to help me battle the darkness just as the darkness seemed to be winning.

I am glad that when one door closes, two or more open.

I know it’s a cliché. But it is a good one.

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January 12, 2021 · 4:15 pm

AeroQuest 4… Canto 123

Canto 123 – Who Can We Trust?

Jadalaqstbr, more often called Jackie because Zaranian names are hard with no vowels at the end, was impressed by the way Alec had taken charge of the situation.  She knew no one really liked or trusted Alec.  He was abrasive and often not worthy of trust.  But he had seduced her more than once by using his telepathy to invade her mind… more than three times already actually.  And she liked it.  There was something both sweet and sad about boys who were that pathetic and secretly needy.  She had always had a soft spot for guys like that.  Her own father had been like that before he died.

  And she could teleport him to five hundred feet in the air and drop him on his head if he did anything really bad.

Jackie noticed Taffy was the one who retrieved the

fallen helmet.

“Do not touch the inside of that!” said Shen Ming-sensei with a frightening suddenness.

“Um, okay…” said Taffy, holding it gingerly.  “Why?”

“Ah, so you see… I remember all of this now… when I could not recall any of it before…  The Avenger helmet was created over 400 years ago to have an intelligence of its own.  I overdid the wisdom circuits, however, and it blew out a morality capacitor.  So, instead of using it to make our commanders smarter in battle, it simply went insane.  We locked it away for four hundred years.  It grew more and more insane with each passing year.  Not only that, it can absorb the skills of those who wear it and amplify them.  So, not only does it have Jai Chaing’s superior bow skill, it has Hassan Parker’s Psionic telepathy.”

“Oh!  You mean it could take over my mind?”  Horrified, Taffy dropped the helmet.

“Ah, this is better.  So, perhaps a telepath should be the one to take this thing back to Mistress Li in the storage basement.”

“Right now, only Hassan and Alec are here with telepathy,” said Mai Ling.

“Ah, yes.  Perhaps giving it back to Hassan is not the best of ideas.  It did have him under its evil spell just moments ago.”  Shen Ming smiled crazily as he shook his head no.

“Um, okay…  I will take it to the storage basement,” Alec said rather hesitantly.

Jackie decided that if Alec was going to take such a risk, she was going with him to teleport him away the instant the evil thing showed the least sign of doing something bad.

Shen Ming and others walked towards the infirmary with Hassan while Alec and Jackie, with the helmet, started towards the stair to the palace basement.

Jackie was admiring Alec’s handsome face and not really paying attention to what Alec was looking it.  He turned the helmet over and over in his hands, peering inside at the neural contact points.

“I wonder how this thing makes people put it on their heads?”

Jackie suddenly turned and looked directly at the former Black Spider student ninja.

“Hassan is the second strongest telepath on Gaijin.  It must have a special power of its own,” she said.

No sooner had she said it than the helmet began to vibrate and glow.  A powerful, dominating voice blasted through her head, probably doing the same to Alec. 

“Put me on your head!  You are in my power!” the voice directed at Alec.  “Jackie, take off all your clothes!  I am your master!” It directed at her.

She could see Alec struggling to disobey the voice, but the helmet slowly raised his hands above his head and slipped it into place on him, the fifth most powerful telepath on Gaijin.

And her own hands no longer obeyed her.  She watched with horror as she completely undressed herself.

“We must escape to the Black Spider Castle!” the helmet said.  The helmet did not sound like Alec.  It seemed to have a voice of its own.

As much as it terrified her to see herself obeying the helmet, Jackie flung her clothing away and started to run.  Alec, wearing the horrid, three-horned helmet ran after her. Where was she going?  She didn’t know where the Black Spider Castle was, but apparently her bare legs did.  She was headed to the last place in the universe where she wanted to be.  And she was going there at high speed.

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January 11, 2021 · 6:16 pm

Write Like You Mean It

I am guilty of writing satire and parody. Many of the things I have said in this blog are written as firmly tongue-in-cheek. But people will often take you seriously… literally… misinterpreting everything you say. They will, via comment, reach into your mouth, pull out that tongue, and wrap it three times around your neck in order to strangle you with it. (I dare you to take that one literally, all you non-humor appreciators.)

Obviously it helps, when talking about satire and parody, that you define the terms so that your reader has at least a little bit of a sense that the idiot writer actually knows what he or she is talking about and not merely flinging big words and obscure ideas around the room. (And, of course, when I refer to myself as an idiot writer, I am hoping that the reader gets the sense that I am being ironic about the fact that truly wise people are the ones who realize how little they know in comparison to what the universe has available for them to know.)

Parody is when you really love a piece of culture, literature, or art and you then imitate it in a humorous way. In my novel AeroQuest (which has now become 3 novels, and I am writing 4 & 5 too) I make fun of Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who, Flash Gordon, Buck Rodgers, and numerous other science-fiction and adventure-fiction things. The humor tends to come from exaggeration, ridiculous situations, extreme irony, and wry observations about our world embedded in the story. And they are written as a homage, not as an attempt to tear those things down.

Satire, on the other hand, is comedy created where you don’t like a thing and you write highly critical commentary about it disguised as the very thing you are criticizing. My narrator in AeroQuest, Googol Marou, is mostly satire. He is a know-it-all, pompous gasser who often holds forth about what people are really like, how their institutions really work, and how the primary purpose of life in the universe is to blow things up.

So, both kinds of writing, I am obviously saying, are in direct opposition to what my title suggests this post is about. Don’t immediately try to pull my tongue out of my cheek. I told you before that was not literal. It is a joke. The tongue-thing, not my title.

I am completely serious when I say that a writer must write about the things he or she already knows. It also needs to be about things you really care about.

My parody novels, then, obviously show how much I care about the novel tropes and movie-serial action/adventure stories that I am reverently imitating, mostly for laughs.

And I mean it also when my stories refute the ideas that blowing up high-population planets is a good thing, done for fun and sometimes profit. We are, after all, busily destroying this planet to make the living Koch Brother insanely richer.

There you have it, then. The mewling excuses for my egregious attempts at committing acts of both parody and satire. I actually mean what I say, even though you may have to use your brain a little bit in order to understand what I am saying.

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January 10, 2021 · 9:35 pm

So Ugly…It’s Beautiful?

Lena the Hyena appeared in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner in 1946.

Basil Wolverton (1909 to 1978) became famous as a cartoonist by winning a contest. He submitted the picture of Lena to Al Capp’s newspaper strip to answer the question of what Lena, who had been appearing for weeks in Li’l Abner underneath a black square with an editor’s warning printed on it that she was just too ugly to be revealed, actually looked like. Capp ran the contest to depict Lena and selected Wolverton’s drawing from among 500,000 entries. I think Capp got it right when he chose this to be the world’s ugliest woman.

Wolverton had done comics before this one amazingly ugly picture. He did Spacehawk for Target Comics up to 1942, and he did a comic series called Powerhouse Pepper for Timely Comics (which is the company that became Marvel after the 1940’s.) But Lena not only brought him fame, it really started him down the path of his intensely detailed “spaghetti and meatballs” style of rather ugly comic art.

He used millions of little dots and lines to create art that would really soak up the printer’s ink supply and gave his artwork a uniquely “pointillistic” look.

Recognize these as portraits of Presidents and politicians?

Here’s Wolverton’s portrait of Bing Crosby.

And here’s monster movie monarch, Boris Karloff.

But what really made Wolverton’s unique artwork popular and lucrative was his uniquely twisted and downright ugly portraits.

ugh! wotta beauty!

Ain’t this one… um… unique?

He would go on to be featured in Mad Magazine, Cracked, Panic Magazine, and Topp’s trading card series of Ugly Posters. He managed to do work that reached amazing levels of monstrously ugly humorous mastery of pen and ink drawings.

For years Basil made me laugh. But there’s no denying it… Basil masterfully drew really, really ugly artwork.

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January 9, 2021 · 7:34 pm

Art Day at the End of the World

I have a few more Science Fiction stories to tell. This one will be called AeroQuest 6 : Galactic Fire,
If I live long enough, I may use the characters of Farbick and Davalon again. They have been in both Catch a Falling Star and Stardusters and Space Lizards.
This picture is from an unnamed story about Earth Humans attending the native Dions’ school on the jungle planet Dionysus. The primitive peoples of the planet are sauroids rather humanoids, but they are connected to the stars thanks to Earther colonists.
This is merely a fantasy picture starring Buster Crabbe (the human on the left who would grow up to play Flash Gordon)
And finally, pirates on a distant planet with two suns (one of which is a red dwarf)

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January 8, 2021 · 8:03 pm

Taking the Path Ahead of Me

From where I now stand, looking towards the future, I can clearly see I do not have very many more steps on my personal path forward. Good thing. My legs are almost ready to give out. I walk with a cane.

More importantly, as a school teacher, the only classes I will be able to teach are the fictional ones in my books. In fact, if my work in progress is the last one I will be able to finish (hopefully), then the dojo pictured above is the last one. At the moment they are learning social justice lessons fighting sentient vegetables on the planet Cornucopea.

There are many things I can take solace in as I near the end of the road. I outlasted the Trump Administration. (At least, technically, because I am still alive today in spite of feeling ill, while Trump’s run has officially reached its end with the electoral college acceptance ceremony in spite of the insurrection.)

There are many, many former students that still fondly remember the year or two (in some cases three) that they spent in my class.

Mai Ling in the picture with the Japanese Castle is an example. Even though the telekinetic ninja girl from the planet Gaijin is entirely fictional, I base all of her dialogue and reactions on a very quiet but extremely effective girl that I taught for two straight years in the seventh and eighth grades. She listened, learned, and then solved any problem I put in front of her. The last I knew she was thriving in a junior college in Laredo, planning on a nursing career. She will have succeeded by now, and would have even if I had never met her. But she told me she liked my class.

I can be grateful too that I have lived long enough to write most of the stories I really wanted to write. Sure, there are nudists in some of my stories, but there are nudists in real life, and in my personal past as well. Maybe they turn off some people that would like my books better without them. But I have some pretty good stories with no nudists in them too. And the nudists I know are some pretty good people. So, I have a right to be grateful for them. My stories, I mean. Though I am grateful for nudists too. I tend to write like I’m baring my soul. And I am proud of my naked truths.

Tiki Astro is a robot boy, built to be practically indistinguishable from a human boy..

Whatever the near future holds in store, I feel ready. I got my $600 relief check. 2020 taxes will probably cost more than that this year, but I actually have some money to hopefully pay for them. I am ill today. But that’s more often the case than not now. I deserve to rest a bit, grow stronger, and get on with whatever’s left to me.

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January 7, 2021 · 9:53 pm

Toxic Politics

Yesterday I thought the nightmare was going to be over with the confirmation of Biden’s victory. I wrote a post lamenting that it appeared Donald Trump would get out of the office without ever being repudiated or convicted of any of the crimes we have been witnessing for four years.

I posted it before the insurrection began.

I know some of my friends and relatives get their political fixes by mainlining Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter. Some of them even believe that Mark Levin is an honorable and intelligent human being. I was disappointed to see how some of them have concluded that the insurrection was justified. Or blame it on Antifa.

I don’t give up on them. I don’t hate them. But they are wrong.

The best way to explain all of this is to review what made my politics what they are.

I was born in 1956, during the Eisenhower Administration. Quite naturally, I was part of a family that identified as Eisenhower Republicans. I learned to believe that the hero of WWII was what a president should be.

About Labor he said in 1956, “Labor is the United States. The men and women, who with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in this country—they are America.”

About Business he said, “Beginning with our creation of the very successful Small Business Administration, and continuing through the recently completed studies and recommendations of the Cabinet Committee on Small Business, which we strongly endorse, we have focused our attention on positive measures to help small businesses get started and grow.”

These are statements from the Republican Party platform.

President John F. Kennedy took over as President in 1956. He was far from a perfect man. But he was an idealist, and had the potential to be one of our best Presidents ever. He stared down Soviet leaders during the Cuban Missile Crisis and peacefully resolved what had the potential to be the beginning of a thermonuclear war. He took on the issue of racial inequality when the Emmit Till murder opened the eyes of both him and his younger brother Robert.

He took on Jimmy Hoffa and organized crime, and that was probably one of the most important factors in getting him assassinated. His potential greatness was cut off at the pass.

My political awareness really began with the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration and the Viet Nam War. My father voted for a Democrat the very first time because Kennedy won him over and he feared the outcome of a radical like Barry Goldwater becoming President.

Here is where you are most welome to debate me.

LBJ was an evil man, whom I believe had a hand in the assassination of JFK. I also believe he was a very effective President, but mostly because he felt guilty and instituted the Great Society reforms JFK had planned, as well as the Civil Rights Act. Much of the good he did meshed well with the goals of the Eisenhower Republicans.

But his Achilles Heel was the Viet Nam War.

Richard Nixon took advantage of the chaos in the Democratic party caused by LBJ’s resignation from the campaign and RFK’s assassination. He was almost as evil as LBJ (not quite as guilty of ordering murders as LBJ.) He undid the gains in Civil Rights with the toxic “Southern Strategy” by using dog-whistles like “bussing” and “law and order” to lure racists like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond into leaving the Democratic Party and becoming Republicans. And he tried to cheat in the 1972 election even though he didn’t need that to beat the excessively liberal George McGovern. He did do one good thing, he founded the EPA.

My father voted for him, but regretted doing so for the rest of his life.

I am skipping over President Gerald R. Ford because he was never elected. So, we as voters, bear no responsibility for any evil he may have done.

Jimmy Carter was the first President I ever voted for. He is the second to last moral man we ever elected President. Although he was a very good man, he was not an effective President.

He did broker a historic deal between Egypt and Israel for Middle East peace that lasted at least until President Sadat of Egypt was assassinated.

And this is where the really toxic problems began. You are certainly welcome to call me out for my opinions here.

President Ronnie “Dutch” Reagan, cowboy and movie star, was not an evil man. But he was not a good man either. He was wealthy, entitled, and basically willing to continue Nixon’s worst practices for the benefit of rich guys, and the disadvantage of poor people, especially poor people of color.

He began rolling back environmental regulations and the rights of unions to bargain for the betterment of workers. Here is where Reagan Republicans became a completely different thing than Eisenhower Republicans.

Then the George HW Bush years began. Bush who may have participated in the CIA’s part in the JFK assassination. Who definitely had a part in the Iran Contra Affair. He was more evil than Reagan, though still less so than Nixon or LBJ.

He flubbed up the “Read my lips, NO NEW TAXES!” thing that lost him the backing of the wealthy elite.

That, of course, leads us to this toxic and evil man. Seriously, he styled himself as the New JFK, but he had more in common with the old LBJ.

His Presidency is the start of the Neo-Liberal Toxicity. What is a neo-liberal, you ask? A Republican in a Democrat suit… or a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He turned on the Democratic agenda, making the policy goals all about business and money. He cracked down on minorities with crime bills, and sent jobs overseas with free trade policies. He might be a pedophile (though he deserves to be presumed innocent until someone actually releases the Epstein records.) He was not a good husband, a good role model, or even a good man. But he was a good President, and brought the economy back for at least the wealthy and the middle class. He is also a good speaker and can explain really well as he tells you how his administration is going to screw you.

And as the backlash to Bill Clinton being too nice to the middle class, we got Lonesome George W. Bush, the rodeo-clown President. His grin and flubs and political oopsies were all good cover for the evil he did. Again, after the Democratic administration made the economy better, he thoroughly broke it again. Bank deregulation became the new way to become an infamous pirate (like Carl Icahn, T, Boone Pickens, and numerous other big-bucks buccaneers.) Remember Enron?

And you can certainly argue this too, but somebody made an awful lot of money during 9-11. And where were the anti-hijack aircraft from the forces that normally protect the airways?

And they then needed a black man to clean up the mess.

They chose a very well-spoken man. They picked a very good man. A good husband. A good family man. A man who could do for the Presidency what Jackie Robinson did for baseball, break the color barrier and endure a lot of horse poop for his trouble.

He improbably brought the economy back to life. He conducted eight years of leadership without significant scandal. And he was a very good man.

Although it would’ve been good if he had not used drones to kill children, and if he had pardoned Edward Snowden.

And in the end, we were left with a government that fosters the worst income inequality the world has ever seen. The environment has been abused for profit at levels that none of us will survive. And the backlash for eight relatively good years with Obama was four years of… yeah, that. We saw it in action yesterday. I am ashamed to be an American. I have hope for the future, but also a lot of anxiety to temper it with. And my confidence in good government is at all-time low.

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January 6, 2021 · 8:25 pm

Limping and Learning

We have not had an acceptable run the last four years. He won… the preening orange peacock. We were forced to live with the results, accepting the conclusions that the bad guys won the election and had a right to rule over us.

They took the economy that Obama had repaired after Bush crashed it and reached new heights, that benefitted only the richest among THEM. And then they crashed it again. Even worse, with more carnage and pain.

And they took the pandemic-survival playbook that Bush requested and Obama perfected enough to avert a horrible Ebola pandemic and tore it up, firing the the response team in Homeland Security because Obama put it together. That worked out well… for people who don’t like black people or Hispanics.

We impeached him, but couldn’t remove him. We investigated him, but let him get away with all the crimes, especially abuse of power, that we uncovered. How is that fair to those of us who never committed a crime, but suffered from his handling of taxation and immigration and national security?

So, what have we learned? I have learned that friends in Iowa who questioned Obama’s birth certificate and called Obama “Black Hitler” will claim I have never been respectful towards their president, and I should be ashamed of myself. And I have learned they can tell me what dramatic irony means… as a term from high school literature class with Mr. Sorum. But they don’t live it… or acknowledge that other people, me for example, are forced to.

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