Ok, so I live in Columbus Ohio and anyone who lives here knows that when OSU football is happening, the town shuts down. Don't try to call anyone, don't try to drive anywhere-either find a place to watch the game or hide until it's all over. I'm new in town and wanted to make an effort to be part of it all. I'm not big on football but I wanted to give it a shot so I agreed to spend half the day drinking at a friend of a friends in preparation for the game. I lasted one hour.
The short of it is that there was a big Bush supporter in the room running his mouth about Clinton's pot smoking comment, as the rethug proceeded to blow out his own bong hit of pot smoke. One year ago, this comment would have made me seethe, but I would have done nothing about it because I wouldn't have wanted to offend anyone, especially someone I barely knew whose apartment I was watching the football game at. Not anymore. As soon as the words were out of his mouth I was at his throat: "At least Clinton didn't drop the ball on the greatest natural disaster in this country's history". I proceeded to go down the list of ways in which Bush dropped the ball, everything from cutting millions from the army corps of engineers to staying on vacation until a day after the hurricane hit. He proceeded to shake his head and claimed that there was nothing Bush could do about it, that Clinton dropped the ball with Hurricane Andrew, that Bush doesn't really make decisions like deciding whether or not to fund the army corps of engineers project in NO(apparently the pentagon is in charge of that??) that Bush is a natural leader and all the democrats can do is blame everything on him and that we have no ideas of our own. Then he told me that I didn't understand history and that I wasn't living in reality. I blew my top. "Listen Motherfucker! One of the greatest natural disasters our country has ever seen hit and the president has done nothing but blame other people. Doens't he realize that the buck stops at him, that he's in charge and there's no one else to blame?" He was shaking his head the entire time, "You just called me a mother fucker, you don't know how to talk politics, I can't talk to you. That's it, I'm through." He looked over to his friend and said, "Dude, you were so wrong about him, he doesn't know what he's talking about and he can't talk politics, you were so wrong." I cut in, "You're telling me politicians never call each others names. Didn't Dick Cheney tell Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself?" At this point, he got up and left the room. My friend looked over to me and said, "Dude, I think you should apologize. I think you offended him." My response, "No, it's gone too far, if he's going to vocally support and defend Bush, I've got no regrets about what I called him. I'm through apologizing to these people. They're destroying the country I love." I got up, said bye, and drove home(nowhere near drunk, only one beer). I'm done apologizing to these people, I'm done backing down. Not one inch.