Two heavy overnight rains in a row, almost like a real monsoon. Sometimes I sleep through the storms, but I know they’ve hit when, glancing out the kitchen window while getting my first cup of coffee in the morning, I see topsoil and fertilizer from Donna’s flower garden spread over the patio and the bottom of the swimming pool.
A job for number one daughter, thank goodness, but I’m giving her the day off … it’ll probably rain again tonight. I wonder how long it’ll be before we southern Arizonans, so used to bitching about our years-long drought, start complaining about the rain? Mind you, I’m not complaining about the rain … just the dirt all over the patio. I’m certainly not unhappy to see the backyard thermometer needle sitting at 74°F.
Two heavy back-to-back rains are not enough to make waterfalls on the Santa Catalina Mountains just north of here. The sides of the mountains are covered with dry waterfall courses. Twice during the nearly 14 years we’ve lived here, we have seen the famous Seven Cataracts. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see them again this year.
All that water gets down to our level, of course, filling normally-dry washes and sweeping foolish drivers and hikers away. So far this season that hasn’t happened, and it’s not a real monsoon until it does. Two more heavy rains ought to get things started.
Well, enough about the freaking weather. How about some freaking Facebook?
The status update and the comment were posted by the same person, someone I’ve called out before for posting scripted comments on Facebook. By “scripted comments” I mean comments written by third parties, usually conservative trend-makers trying to use social media to influence public debate. This one looks as if she wrote it herself, I must say, but that #hypocrite hashtag at the end sends up a red flag.
Facebook doesn’t recognize hashtags. If you search Facebook for #hypocrite, you won’t get all posts labeled with the hashtag #hypocrite, as you will on Twitter, which does use hashtags. When I search Twitter for #hypocrite, I get hundreds of tweets. Many of them are anti-Obama posts, like this one (not from my friend but from someone else entirely):
My Facebook friend clearly didn’t write her post and comment with Twitter in mind, because she’s way over Twitter’s 140-character limit. So I don’t know what’s up with the hashtag, other than that I associate tags like #hypocrite and #shameful with anti-Obama posts I’ve seen on Twitter.
By the way, that “MEECHELLE” thing? Rush Limbaugh habitually refers to the First Lady as “Michelle, ma belle,” pronouncing it “Mee-chelle.” The first time I ever called my Facebook friend out for posting scripted comments, she had posted a complaint about “Michelle, ma belle” paying a visit to the King of Spain. I smell a Rush Limbaugh-scented rat here.
Of course I don’t know that. All I know is what I read on Facebook and Twitter. Pretty clearly, my Facebook friend’s post has to do with Obama, and not in a positive way. I think she’s saying that when defenders of President Obama accuse conservatives of opposing him on racial grounds, they abuse the race card. Waving that card makes them racist, and prevents the rest of us from moving on to a post-racial world where we can criticize a president who just happens to be black without being accused of racism. Because, really, no one is opposed to President Obama just because he’s black. Oh, no. It’s his policies, you see … like his policy of having been born in Kenya or his policy of being a secret Muslim.
When Rush Limbaugh criticizes President Obama, it’s post-racial. When Rush describes Obama as “uppity” or says “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations,” he’s criticizing Obama’s policies in a post-racial manner. When Rachel Maddow or a leftist guest of Piers Morgan, on the other hand, suggests conservatives are fanning the flames of racism … that’s racist.
So here’s a hashtag of my own, one that seems appropriate to end this post with: #confused