Whatever the Outcome, the World Won’t End

You would think from the way some political partisans on both sides of the ideological divide are talking, the sky will fall Tuesday night if the presidential candidate they oppose is elected to the White House.

You just want to look them square in the eyes and slowly and calmly say “Breathe … take deeeeep breaths.”

The true believers on the both the right and the left are hyperventilating and working themselves into a tizzy in the final days and hours of the campaign. They and their media folks are in full-steam-ahead mode churning out the exaggerated, over-the-top “news” releases and voter alerts. And they’re doing no one, especially not their country, any favors.

First, let’s consider the Chicken Little crowd on the right.

Friday, The Washington Post reported that Dr. James Dobson and his organization, Focus on the Family, had released a fictional “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” signed simply “A Christian.” It attempts to paint a portrait of America would be like after four years of an Obama presidency.

And it’s nothing less than pure balderdash.

In Dobson’s America of 2012, these are just a few of the dire consequences of the 2008 election:

* The Boy Scouts have disbanded rather than accept gay scoutmasters.

* Elementary schools, beginning in the first grade, now teach courses on gender identity, including the “goodness of homosexuality.”

* Faith-based adoption agencies are now a thing of the past, and Christian couples seeking to adopt a child find it increasingly difficult to do so because of their “dangerous” worldviews.

* Churches must open their facilities for “homosexual weddings” and hire gay staffers, even if they’re opposed to the lifestyle on moral grounds.

* Faith-based student organizations at public and private colleges and universities have all but vanished because of government rules and Supreme Court decisions.

And the fearmongering just goes on and on.

Dobson’s group, at least, has put its name on its smear campaign.

All across the Internet are anonymous sites that purport to prove Obama’s not a natural-born U.S. citizen, that he’s really a Muslim in disguise, that he and his coterie of Marxist advisers have a plan waiting in the wings to turn America’s democratic republic into a socialist state. And we won’t even touch the race-based smears that are swirling in the sewers of the far right.

What a load of … garbage. (There are stronger words we wanted to use, but The News & Advance is a family-friendly newspaper.)

But fear mongering and sliming isn’t confined just to the conservative side of the spectrum.

For months, on the left, there has been a whispering campaign going on that McCain is “obviously” showing early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Based on what? Nothing more than a couple of flubbed lines in a few news conferences.

And it gets worse.

The leftist hacks still try to say McCain wants to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for a century, despite the fact he never said or meant such a thing.

They’re trying to pin the subprime mortgage crisis and the resulting financial meltdown in the world’s stock markets on McCain, despite the fact he was calling for reforms and more government oversight years before anyone else, even in the face of Democratic opposition.

They try to paint McCain as a hardcore conservative ideologue, despite that he has a long history both of bucking his own party and of working with Democrats on a host of issues.

They go on to claim a McCain presidency would lead to the imposition of religious theocracy in America through a takeover of the Supreme Court.

The poor and minorities? Forget about them. Toss them to the side of the road. Social programs, they say, would be the first to come under the ax. President McCain, the lefties say, would only be concerned with the billionaires and big corporations.

It just goes on and on and on.

After going through just one day’s worth of e-mail in the junk folder, we just can’t help feeling sad and angry about what passes for political debate in this country today.