I Can't Take IT Anymore!

What's "IT" you ask? "IT" is the incredible ignorance of the American public.

Notice that I said "ignorance" and not "stupidity." We'll talk about stupidity some other time.

There is an old saying that you are entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts and what we're talking about here are simple facts.

When I read comments on the Internet I am literally flabbergasted at what people think is true. I don't know where they get some of their ideas. Even Faux News doesn't misinform this badly.

Look, you are entitled not to like something; you can even not like something for no particular reason but at least try to ascertain the facts.

I'm fascinated by this attitude that everything, no matter what it is, somehow is Obama's fault. Here are facts that some people don't seem aware off.

- The President doesn't make all the rules. Rules have been being made in this country for a couple of hundred years. Every new president doesn't rewrite all of them.

- The president's administration doesn't approve everyone that enters the country so the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in this country wasn't "let in" by the Obama administration.

- Obama did not only win the electoral vote in 2008 and 2012. In 2008 he won the popular vote 53%-46%. In 2012 he won it 51%-47%.

- The US is actively engaged in the fight against ISIS. US led coalition aircraft have executed some 5,000 sorties against ISIS forces.

- The 2009 budget deficit of $1.4 trillion was a Bush budget and not an Obama budget. Of course the deficits in 2010 and 2011 of $1.3 trillion were all his.

- The US, despite all of the spats, is still the best, and about the only, ally that Israel has left. The Europeans have already lost patience with Netanyahu,
-----Only the US and Australia voted against a security council Palestinian statehood resolution. Britain abstained. France, China and Russia all voted for it. Only a last minute decision by Nigeria to abstain prevented the US from having to use its veto.
-----It is a breach of protocol for congress to invite a foreign leader to speak.
-----It is US policy to never meet with a foreign leader close to election time in that leaders country.

Not that I expect any of these right wing fools to change their attitude after learning the facts. Psychological tests indicate that showing a conservative he's wrong simply makes him dig in his heels and become more insistent that he's right.

I've been wrong about quite a few things in my life but never so wrong as I was about Obama being able to somehow heal the discord in this country. To say things have gotten considerably worse would be a huge understatement.

Is it as bad as the 60s? We may not be literally fighting in the streets but I'm not sure I see a way out of this current conflict and this inability to agree on the facts is a big part of the problem.

The other big part is that social conservatives are just too plain stupid to realize what they think are the facts just ain't so.