Election season: The time when well-meaning family members forward every fool piece of foofaraw that finds its way in their inboxes.

For the most part, I've manfully avoided rising to the bait, but today one of my siblings forwarded a particularly vile piece of fearmongering-masquerading-as-patriotism in the form of a Kittitas County (WA) Daily Record column by one Mathew Manweller, a professor of political science at Central Washington University in Ellensburg (a town I've spent a bit of time in).

Manweller's column, which you may yourself have received from a well-meaning but misguided family member, starts off with this laughable bit of boogum:

This November we will vote in the only election during our lifetime that will truly matter [emphasis mine]. Because America is at a once-in-a-generation crossroads, more than an election hangs in the balance. Down one path lies retreat, abdication and a reign of ambivalence.

and goes downhill from there.

My reply was a quick, angry burst off the top of my head to all the recipients of my sibling's email (have you noticed that well-meaning but misguided family members rarely avail themselves of the Bcc: option?):

Below is a letter that should be be thought-provoking (without quotation marks) even if you're politically sympathetic to a president who stands for 1) hitting first, 2) hitting the wrong enemy first, 3) hitting the wrong enemy first with too few troops, 4) hitting the wrong enemy first with too few troops and declaring "Mission accomplished" prematurely, 5) deliberately misleading the American public about who was responsible for attacking us, 6) lying about having deliberately misled the American public about who was responsible for attacking us, 7) creating the perfect recruitment poster for terrorists, 8) not holding his high officials responsible for egregious policy and intelligence mistakes, 9) refusing to acknowledge any mistakes whatsoever, 10) flip-flopping on whether he thinks the war on terrorism can even be won, and, to cut a very long list short, 11) being too stupid to know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland. (Hmm, maybe he meant to invade Iran, which really *does* have an active nuclear weapons program, and just got the name wrong. Or maybe Korea.)

As a New Yorker who watched the World Trade Center burn with his own eyes, I'm mad as hell that Bush has sidetracked this country from the real war on terrorism. Why is the man who attacked my city and killed my neighbors still free and sending us taunting video tapes while the capture of a second-rate tinpot dictator who hasn't had the capacity to hurt us for years is held up as an example of America's might? To me, George Bush has broken his promise to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice. (Remember how he was going to get bin Laden "dead or alive"?) I don't feel one bit safer living in New York today with George Bush in the White House than I did three years ago. But let the letter below, from the mother of a 9/11 victim, speak to that more eloquently.

George Bush stands for American values the way Howard Stern stands for family entertainment. He's a whited sepulchre, a tinkling cymbal, and sounding brass, and I look forward to putting him behind us.

Bill Shunn

I then copied in the text of Donna Marsh O'Connor's open letter to George W. Bush, which I have blogged here before, and added the little bit about Sweden from Ron Suskind's "Without a Doubt" (New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004).

My sibling responded by sending me that well-circulated collection of George Bush photos paired with similar shots of chimpanzees. She opined that, judging from my comments, I would probably find it amusing. I replied that I found it insulting to the chimps. How quickly an exchange of ideas devolves.

But in the plus column, while researching the Manweller column I found a terrific point-by-point rebuttal over at Daily Kos. My favorite bit:

[Y]ou're worried about the message we will send to future presidents. So what would future presidents take away from George W. Bush's defeat in 2004? Here are a few: Don't be stupid. Don't be lazy. Don't be arrogant. Don't be dishonest. Don't take America to war for bogus reasons. Not a bad set of lessons for future presidents to learn, I'd say.

So the exercise was not a complete waste of time.