A note to the president

Dear Barack Obama,

I want you to know that this is not personal, because I shuddered in horror every time I heard George W. Bush say "nuke-you-ler" over and over again during his eight years in office.

But here's the thing-


If you are going to say:

PAH - kee - stahn

and

TAHL - ee -bahn

would you please, please, please stop saying

aaaaf - GAAN - ih - staaan?


Really. I mean, REALLY. You sound like a mincing, pinky-pointing intellectucrat when you say the first two words with that odd affected accent, but your pronunciation of "Afghanistan" is pure midwest America with the intonation of the vowels drawn straight through your sinuses and down through the nose. It's kind of like Madonna (who hails from working class Detroit, far removed from the likes of London's posh West End) putting on that smarmy fake British accent, only more embarrassing. Because you should know better and she is Madonna and given to such idiocies.

So stop it. Just....stop. I already feel that I have enough to deal with, what with you getting up in front of a bunch of microphones last week and telling us in your pompous way that CIA interrogation techniques for terrorists are so unspeakably awful that they have caused the United States to "[lose] [its] moral bearings." Because, you're the one who voted as a state senator in Illinois to keep partial birth abortions legal, right? And you also voted against the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act?* And yet you somehow think that "waterboarding" terrorists is a greater moral failing in our society than......leaving a newborn baby unattended until it dies from lack of care? Or sticking a scalpel through the back of a living baby's neck to cut up its brains so that they can be suctioned out and the skull crushed for easier removal?

I've tried to work your skewed logic out inside my head, but I just can't make the pieces fit: Why are you so moved by the plight of the terrorist, whom we can assume to know his way around an assault rifle and assorted explosives and incendiary devices, but you have no mercy in you for a vulnerable infant, a viable newborn whose only offense is that his mother doesn't want to raise him?

You have a seriously screwed up sense of morality, bud. And some vocabulary problems, too.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.


Sincerely yours,
Citizen Shelley






*That piece of legislation was passed in 2005, no thanks to you.