House of Eratosthenes

…then please, kindly, stay the hell away from me. Everyone’s talking about it and here’s your link: Barack Obama’s spin on the comments from that nutty pastor of his. The money quote comes near the end (bolded):

Rev. Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life. In other words, he has never been my political advisor; he’s been my pastor.
:
All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn. They in no way reflect my attitudes and directly contradict my profound love for this country. [emphasis mine]

You know what, forget about me. Let’s instead think about women. What if the United States of America is a woman.

No let’s go one step even beyond that. It’s a hypothetical question I’d like pondered from sea to shining sea this year: If a man loved his wife the way democrats love America, how would he treat her?

Well, he wouldn’t act very manly at all, the way he’d keep bringing up things she did in the past, completely out of context. That’s a stereotype applied to small-minded, intemperate girlfriends and wives, isn’t it? Bringing up a bunch of things out of nowhere that you did ten years ago? So I guess he’d go to work, hang around the water cooler, babble away during the lunch hour — never getting far away from the subject of what a moral reprobate his wife is. You talk about sports, he’ll find a way to change the subject to a check his wife bounced a few years ago. You talk about religion, he’ll talk about his wife’s unpaid parking tickets. You talk about politics, he’ll talk about her old boyfriends — not humorously, but ominously, about the lack of character she must still have today, for ever interlocking with someone like that.

Always always always: Coming to unflattering conclusions about her, will be the point. The evidence will be cherry-picked to support this. He won’t even pretend to be analyzing it even-handedly. He’ll just be there to talk some smack.

Loving husband?

He’d surround himself with people who know her, who have axes to grind against her, who can’t stop putting her down. Right up until she caught him doing it…and then he would, I guess, yank a bunch of talking points out of the Obama masterpiece linked above. He’s my co-worker, sweetie, not my marriage counselor.

Loving husband?

He’d be at his most negative right after she had done something most positive. Scanning the landscape of domestic history, reviewing one pile of wreckage after another in the wake of liberal ideas implemented in this America that Barack Obama claims to love, one could only fairly conclude such a hapless wife would have to perform all the chores if they were to be performed at all. She’d fix the cars — her spouse would always notice they always ran better before she touched them, even if they could not have been used. The bed always looked better before she made it, even if it could not have been occupied. The food was always better before she cooked it, even if it would have been raw and inedible. Oh, he would never think of leaving all the work to her, though; he’d volunteer to help out time and time again. Thinking out this analogy with the events of healthcare in mind…lawsuits and torts…public education…the war in Iraq…the oil market…the only marriage I can envision is one where his help is the problem. She wishes he was substantially lazier than he really is. Things are done — the way he wants them to be done, for he insists on it — they turn to crap, which he notices and promptly blames her for it.

Loving husband?

Asked what exactly it is about his wife that he loves, he’d say not a single word about what she is or what abilities he has learned she has, but instead, about what he hopes she one day becomes. He’d talk about what she wants to be…never having discussed these points of improvement with her, just pulling them out of his own rear end, insofar as how she is to get better.

If you ask him directly WHAT IS GOOD ABOUT YOUR WIFE, he will change the subject to what is good about HIM! He has hope! He will change! He is Mister Hope-Change! He has a lot of hope that his wife will change! …but you better believe she has to, because she sure as hell isn’t right the way she is.

Loving husband?

He’d shower on her all kinds of glittery, awkward compliments that really don’t mean very much, and mean absolutely nothing at all in terms of what could actually be appreciated. She has the values of…equality and diversity. And she’s tolerant, or hey, at least she knows she should be, and if she ever forgets it I’ll be sure and remind her. The tolerance is a one-way street, of course. She is to tolerate anything that comes out of his mouth, even if it has to do with destroying her economically and physically, but if the bitch gets one syllable out-o-line the back-o-my-hand will have mid-course correction written ALL over it!

Loving husband?

This wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t explore defense. If she ever needs defending, this swell loving husband will make sure not only will he be absent, but he’ll put forth every excuse in the book about how nobody else should defend her either. If she needs to be driven home to that loving husband across a bad part of town, he’ll do whatever he can to make sure nobody volunteers. If someone does volunteer, he’ll call him a baby-killer. And if someone bothers to point out that giving her the ride home might be a good thing, he’ll be right there to ask “well then how come you aren’t there doing it?”

Loving husband?

He’ll chide her for not doing what outsiders agree with him she should be doing. He’ll call them her “allies.” Maybe they’re her co-workers, her family, her friends…maybe they’re his. Maybe he’ll be unfaithful, showing love and devotion to some of these “allies” well and above any magnitude of the same thing he might direct to her. The consequences and benefits involved in doing what these “allies” want her to do, he will leave everlastingly unexplored and unexplained. She should just do what these outsiders want…which is what he wants her to do…because they are her “allies.”

Loving husband?

Don’t forget the big kahuna:

After some horrible event in which she is assaulted, devastatingly, he will mock her for ever bringing it up again, insisting there is “no sexual assault threat.”

He will do everything he possibly can to fight her efforts to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

He will come up with new and ingenious ways to get sex offenders sprung from prison…in the very neighborhood in which he lives with her. He will fight night and day that these sex offenders get all kinds of “rights” to which they are not really entitled.

He’ll lobby to have the jail closed down.

He’ll come up with nonsensical rules the police have to follow when they try to arrest the next suspect who might molest his own wife. He will refuse to pay for the alarm system his wife would want to put on their home. He won’t even support the decision to put locks on the doors. He’ll take down the locks. And then he’ll take down the doors.

Of course, if she wants to buy a gun to defend herself — you know what you can do with that idea.

He’ll ridicule her at every turn, especially when she is on her way to church. He won’t let her put articles of her faith anywhere in the home. If he does allow her to keep so much as a Bible, he’ll insist that she put it somewhere he never has to see it. And, like Barack Obama, he’ll openly fraternize with — brag about fraternizing with — people who hate her.

In short, he’d make Eliot Spitzer look like a real sweetheart.

Very well put.
- JohnJ | 03/16/2008 @ 15:07
I enjoy all your posts but this one is special. It goes on my list of, Best of MKF. Thanks.
- franklaughter | 03/16/2008 @ 19:34
Great analogy.

“When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign.”

Yea, OK.
- tim | 03/17/2008 @ 12:22
Agreed. Well done.

Might even be a good idea for a bumpersticker.

“If you love me the way Democrats love America,
Stay the Hell Away From Me!!!“

😉
- philmon | 03/17/2008 @ 13:44
You’ve left some concepts and mind-benders that influenced me before, but this is one that really hit home. It was not the main gist of the article, but was instead, in the example.
I have drifted into being an example of that husband that you described. I’ve gradually gotten to where any conversation that could even remotely regard my wife, would set me off on a stream of borderline invective…. Well, you get the idea.
She doesn’t deserve that, whether she knows about it or not so I’m just not going to do it anymore. End of story.
Thanks much,
- orwoody | 03/17/2008 @ 17:13
Thanks for the kind words, all.
- mkfreeberg | 03/17/2008 @ 17:50
Yep… masterful metaphor, Morgan. (sez the master of Unconscious Alliteration)

Apropos of nothing… I couldn’t get to your site yesterday, were there issues of some sort? Enquiring Minds, and all that…
- Buck | 03/18/2008 @ 16:48
House of Eratosthenes is a “squatter”. We’re squatting on webloggin.com, hence the URL. Webloggin is going through some upgrades right now and so we’ve got some outages here & there…some anticipated, some not, but we’ll ride it out.

A big thank you to Terry Trippany for maintaining resource availabiltiy well above what Blogger can manage, for exactly the same cost. Outages like this have been a relatively rare happenstance. It’s been noticed. Well done.
- mkfreeberg | 03/18/2008 @ 18:45
[…] gets a little bit off-topic, but awhile ago I had written about what an incredibly unloving act it is to tell a person — or a country — to straighten […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 04/20/2008 @ 09:55
[…] our nation’s defense. But, of course, they don’t. If your sister ever married a man who loved her the way they love America, you’d be honor-bound to drag him into the street and give him the righteous beatdown that […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 04/14/2013 @ 10:31
[…] me of something I jotted down a bit earlier. And, […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/11/2013 @ 08:47
[…] Six: I want the next President to love the United States as she is right-here-and-freakin’-now. Again, too much to ask? I want the President to love the country the way a man is expected to love his wife. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 06/18/2015 @ 05:30

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If You Love Me Like democrats Love America…Sunday, March 16th, 2008

If You Love Me Like democrats Love America…
Sunday, March 16th, 2008