Schadenfreude, it's what's for dinner.
Yeah, I saw this posted elsewhere yesterday and had a chuckle over it. I had been putting up the highlights of Abortion Barbie's campaign flailings on my personal FB page for the last several weeks and it eventually rubbed a nerve with some of my former high school alums.
Background: Almost two years ago one of my acquaintances from high school tracked me down on FB and sent me a friend request. I have a very small number of FB "friends" that are mostly close relatives. This is because I mostly despise FB and the notion of informing everyone of where I had coffee today and what variety it was along with what my child's latest artwork is and how wonderful it is and so on...yeah, I am a curmudgeon that way. I like to keep my life mostly private and I don't particularly care to know every detail of others' lives. So...why am I even on FB? Some of you may remember but I will reveal it again: FB was the only way that I could keep track of my son while he was deployed in Afghanistan. Phone calls were not adequate and traditional letter writing took too long and was not necessarily reliable. So that's why I'm on FB.
More background: Anyway, it came as quite a surprise when a person from my (Texas) high school era requested a FB contact. I granted it and then never heard from him personally (which was fine with me since I was never close to him). But what did happen is that I got linked to quite a few other people from that time period that I was close to. And they made "friend" requests which I then granted. A year ago I went to Texas to do some maintenance and improvements to my rental house and while there I visited one of them. It was quite nostalgic. In a good way. The "friend" requests continued with some people that I wasn't all that close to and, as you can probably guess, some of them (the ones who live in and around Austin) are more than a little on the left side of politics. None of us were political in high school, of course...that crap usually gets started during the college years. So I had no idea about the beliefs of some of them until this year's election campaigns began to heat up in late summer and early fall.
Which brings me back to the original point of this post: I began to post youtube vids of Wendy Davis in which I referred to her as Abortion Barbie. The vids were pretty unflattering because, well, Wendy Davis is an arrogant ass who ran an offensive and incompetent campaign. She is a despicable and vile person. And here's the funny part: These left-leaning FB "friends" took exception to my postings but not because of what I was posting (it's hard to argue with the truth unless you are truly deranged). No...they were upset that I used the "Abortion Barbie" name instead of Wendy Davis. This was what I was hoping for and I launched into a terrific debate with a couple of them in which they were completely unprepared to compete. I asked them what they found offensive about my postings and one of them said that "name calling" was immature and that I was demonstrating that I a "hater." I told them that I wouldn't waste a particle of emotion on Wendy Davis and especially not for hatred because she wasn't worth the effort. In the second round I reminded them that 1) the left had come up with any number of "names" for their opponents and listed not a few examples, that 2) mocking politicians was a time honored tradition in politics, that 3) we should be proud to taunt and mock politicians because we live in one of the few places on Earth where it is a right, that 4) politicians should know in advance that they will be mocked...it comes with the job and finally, 5) I didn't particularly care one way or the other what Democrats/leftists said about Republicans/conservatives, that none of it was offensive to me.
I was able to string the above condensed version out over several days and a half a dozen or so posts so it went on for quite a while. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Them? Probably not so much towards the middle and end when I reminded them that it was a long standing liberal position to protect all free speech...that political correctness was the antithesis of freedom and liberty. I cut them off at the knees, figuratively speaking.
So far I have resisted the temptation to put up any post election gloating-type comments. It has been more than a little enjoyable to watch one lib female former classmate drown her sorrows in nostalgic postings about the "good-old-days" when Ann Richards governed Texas (for one term) and "why can't we return to that era when everything made sense and we were all happy and the skies were always blue and sun-shiny before that damned George W. Bush got elected and screwed up the state forever?"
Yep, Wendy Davis was fun. I will miss her.
