All Clear

Image via Wikipedia* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're exotic and different.

* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, you're a quintessential American story.

* If you name your kid Barack, you're un-American.

* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're 'colorful'.

* If you grow up with a single mom on food stamps, you're an elitist.

* If you marry an heiress who wears earrings worth $283,000 and you own nine homes and a private jet, you're a 'regular guy'.

* If you're 18, white, and get an underage girl pregnant, it's a 'blessed event.'

* If you're 18, black, and get an underage girl pregnant, you're a rapist and a registered sex offender.

* If you're a woman and you're selected for a job over more qualified candidates, you're a token hire.

* If you're a Republican woman and you're selected for the second most important job in the world over more qualified candidates, you're a 'game changer'.

* If you accept Darwinian evolution, you can't think for yourself.

* If you accept a creation story that even the Pope acknowledges as a metaphor, you're an independent thinker. (Ditto for the hard science behind the man-made causes of climate change.)

* If you're a Democrat and you choose a VP who had an aneurysm when Reagan was still in office, you're reckless.

* If you're a 72-year-old Republican who has had 4 bouts with cancer in the last 7 years and you choose a hockey mom unfamiliar with the Bush Doctrine to replace you as the leader of the free
world in the event of your demise, you're a maverick.

* If you get 18 million people to vote for you in a national presidential primary, you're a phony.

* Get 100,000 people to vote you governor of the 47th least populous state in the Union, you're 'well loved.'

* Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable.

* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating 6 years later, you're well-grounded.

* If you are biracial and born in a state not connected to the lower 48, America needs nearly two years of constant daily media coverage to 'get to know you.'

* If you're white and from a state not connected to the lower 48, America needs 36 minutes and 38 seconds worth of an acceptance speech to know you're 'one of us.'

* If you spend three years as a highly effective community organizer, become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 50,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a constitutional law professor, spend eight years as a state senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend four years in the United States Senate representing 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works, and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

* If your CV consists of a job as a local tv sportscaster, winner of the Miss Wasilla pageant, PTA member, four years on the town council and six years as the mayor of an Anchorage suburb with
fewer than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state that boasts a population slightly larger than Charlotte, NC and an island from which an uninhabited rock belonging to Russia can be seen under favorable weather conditions, you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

* If your wife is a lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't
represent America's.

* If your husband is nicknamed 'First Dude', has at least one DUI conviction, didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA , your family is a model for all Americans.

* If you refuse funds from lobbyists and special interest groups and ban them from your campaign, you're just another politician.

* If your top campaign advisors include 83 of the most powerful corporate lobbyists in Washington, you're a reformer.

* If your pastor rails against racial and socio-economic inequality in the United States of America, you're an extremist.

* If your pastor welcomes a sermon by a member of Jews for Jesus who preaches that the killing of Jews by terrorists is a lesson to Jews that they must convert to Christianity, you're a devout
fundamentalist.

* If you spend 18 months building a campaign around the theme of 'Change,' it's just empty rhetoric.

* If one week before your party's national convention you suddenly make your candidacy about 'Change,' that's the real deal.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 daughters and dedicating yourself to improving people's lives, you have no integrity.

* If you came back from a war to find that your wife had been disfigured by an accident, then cheated on her with a rich beauty queen, then left your family to marry the beauty queen just one month later, you're a man of steadfast 'honor'.

* If you teach responsible, age-appropriate sex education to protect children from sexual predators, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence-only policies, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're a paragon of moral virtue.

* If you raise 300 million dollars and build the largest donor base in American history with new technology, defeating the formidable Clinton political machine, you haven't accomplished much.

* If you answer a phone call from someone you met once, you're the new voice of the Republican Party.

* If you're a rich white beer heiress and you steal drugs to feed your addiction, it's a personal challenge you had to overcome.

* If you're black and poor and you even use drugs, never mind steal them, you go to prison.

* If you're a strong, intelligent, accomplished black woman who speaks honestly, you're 'angry'.

* If you're a white woman who ridicules the work of community organizers and equates herself with the most vicious dog breed, you're a breath of fresh air.

* If you speak to crowds of men wearing "Hottest VP Ever" buttons, it's a great step forward for women.

* If you point out the sexism inherent in this, you're a sexist.

* If you support an illegal war that has cost over 100,000 innocent civilians and 4,000+ American soldiers their lives, if you shoot defenseless wolves from airplanes and promote energy legislation that would wipe out endangered polar bears, if you believe in the death penalty, if you support the right of civilians to own assault weapons, and if you believe that a teenager who was raped by her father or whose life is endangered by pregnancy should carry it to term, you are 'pro-life'.

* If you believe that war should only be a last resort, if you believe in protecting all of God's creatures, if you feel that life imprisonment is more humane than execution, if you think that
assault weapons should be taken off the streets, if you believe that the aforementioned teenager's life should be saved, you have no respect for life.