Sean Reiser

Had a conversation with an old school friend on my over Facebook. She tends to be considerably more conservative then I am and seemed to be annoyed by the President on a number of issues which I considered to be superficial at best. As people who read this blog know, I'm more interested in us getting along as a nation and this is the type of BS that gets in the way.

She stared off with one of my pet peeves. She referred to him as "Osama / Obama". I pointed out that the only reason people invoke the Osama or Hussain cards is to link the man to terrorism. She feels that anyone who was given those names should've changed them in light of 9/11. I really believe that's a trap. If he changed them the topic of conversation would be "see he's secretly a Muslim and changed his name so we wouldn't realize it". Also I pointed out that I share a last name with open source developer and wife murderer Hans Reiser. A number of people in my field know about Hans. Should I change my last name to announce that I don't support murdering wives?

She also had issue with the fact that he's known as Barry to his friends and Barak to the nation. She feels that he goes by Barak to "push something down our throats", although I didn't understand what was being pushed, it's his name. She kept bringing up that the name Barak Hussain Obama isn't "apple pie" enough. I will say she is consistent, I asked if Bobby Jindel decided to use his given name, Piyush, more if she'd have a problem with it. She told me she would.

Finally, and this is where it got really odd this was a discuss on whether Obama is really America's First African American President. She points out that Obama is of mixed race and is both white and black. And, where that's mathematically correct I use a different test, which I call the Good Ol' Boy test. If you get pulled over in GA by a state trooper, does the officer treat you like you're white or black? I use that because that really defines a person's experience. No one has ever looked at Obama and thought "I wonder if he's white" and, unlike every other president, he doesn't look like he could be on the cover of WASP Weekly (Yes, I know JFK was Catholic and not technically a WASP but he certainly looked WASP-y).

At the end of the day, she confessed that she's mad at him for beating McCain. Isn't that part of our system of government? Someone wins, someone loses. If anything is un-American, I think it's being bitter when our candidate loses and acting out of spite. Isn't' there something better for use to argue over?