Well, we’ve returned from visiting my wife’s family for Thanksgiving. They are all quite nice to me and we get along great (we’ve been married for twenty years – whatever animosity there was went away a long time ago). Anyway, they are all FoxNews enthusiasts and know that I am the sole liberal and Obama apologist in the room. Therefore, these family gatherings tend to involve my father-in-law ambushing me and a few others piling on. Fortunately, I’m ready.
So, at your family gathering, what crazy stuff did you hear? For me, two things stand out:
[ul]
[li]Part of the recent Iran deal says that “we have to fix their planes.” No one has any idea what planes or why we have to fix them or if Iran will pay for this service or what. Of course, there was also how we’re giving them billions of dollars even though they are still going to develop nuclear weapons.[/li][li]Obama is the weakest president ever. However, even though he is so weak, he is responsible for every bad thing that happens. So, he is, at the same time, ineffectually weak and also all-powerful. He is so weak, he can’t do anything, but he can unilaterally change laws to suit his every whim.[/li][/ul]
So, what crazy stuff did your father-in-law or other loved ones hit you with?
(Full disclosure: This is a takeoff from a Gawker thread. My family will be visiting us on Saturday. The opposite will happen. We end up being a liberal echo chamber and spend the whole day agreeing with each other. It’s really kind of sad.)
It is a political topic. As I peruse the Elections forum, I see a number of threads on things like the Affordable Care Act, local Senate offices, and filibuster reform. My topic seemed to fit. If a mod disagrees (and has a break from Thanksgiving festivities), I welcome the change to a more appropriate forum.
There wasn’t really much discussion of politics at my extended family’s dinner. Though, if there had been, it probably would have gone a bit differently than Drum God’s, given that the aunt who was hosting is one of the few genuine hippies left in the world, and probably considers Bernie Sanders to be too conservative. The craziest thing that happened was probably my cousin’s wife managing to completely shut down the blood flow to his brain, just before we dug in.
Oddly enough I didn’t hear a word about politics this year. And considering one of my aunts was once a part of Mike Huckabee’s political team, that’s extraordinary.
I’m not sure what this means. Was he just being exceptionally stupid, or did he literally have a stroke?
My parents have a fundamental disagreement with how holidays should work. My dad thinks holidays should be a time when the whole family comes together and spends time with each other. My mom thinks holidays should be spent with people you actually like. They split the difference this year: Thanksgiving was some family, and a few close friends. Christmas will be, if I’m counting correctly, approximately half the population of California. So Thanksgiving was pretty low drama. The highlight, I think, was when my dad’s friend Mike tried to hold the platter of turkey so that someone else could serve themselves, and accidentally managed to dump about half a cup of turkey grease onto the desert in the center of the table.
Thankfully, it was a godawful marshmellow and jello concoction, whipped up by a very nice old lady who’s friend with my mom, who should never be allowed near any sort of cooking implement, ever. So it’s not like the desert could have been ruined, exactly, given where it was starting from.
Politics was largely limited to laughing about the mayor of Toronto. We’re all pretty lefty-lib, so there’s not much to discuss when it comes to politics. Everyone already agrees with each other, so there’s not much to say. Thankfully, this, at least, usually holds for Christmas as well. The real trick is to keep my aunt from drinking so much she falls down and breaks her hip again. But if she does, she’ll probably find a way to blame it on Bush, and not Busch.
Our Thanksgiving gathering was mercifully politics free. With the recent passing of my mom, I am now the sole Obama supporter among a family of TP types (who now seem to be describing themselves as Libertarians). My sister made a comment that was somewhat political and everyone else clamped down on her right away. No one wants a repeat of one of our more combative episodes of Thanksgivings passed.
No actual politics discussion at my Thanksgiving (thank God), but I ground my teeth a little at the Taboo game being played at the next room, when, for instance, my aunt gave “Obama should be” as a clue for “impeached”.
I was at a long-time family friend’s house for Thanksgiving and she and her husband are Tea Party supporters and hate Obama like you would expect of TP types. Thankfully, the night was mostly politics free. However, she made a few remarks during dinner about how the White House has something like 22 pies available for the holidays and how such a waste that was and typical of this administration and made a few remarks about Mrs. Obama in terms of needing to watch her waistline given her exercise nonsense or some such blabber. I rejoined that the Bush White House probably had quite a few pies for the holidays but didn’t really want to continue the argument (and didn’t know the info myself). The dinner was thankfully largely drama free.
To clarify about my cousin: We were doing the standard, go around the table and say what you’re thankful for, schtick. “Hey, wait, we haven’t heard from R (my cousin) yet. R, what are you thankful for?” L (R’s wife): “Hold that thought for a moment.” She then leans over and gives him about a ten-second kiss. R gets a really dumb look on his face and then says “I’m thankful for… sex. And, um, L.”
So, I’ve got two uncles on my dad’s side. One of them, we’ll call him Bill, is a notorious pennypincher. Me, my dad, my other uncle–call him Dick–my mom and I were talking about this, and all of his crazy things (e.g., avoiding using his turn signal because it will burn out the bulb; not opening the dishwasher because it will wear out the spring). Uncle Dick tells us this story of when he went to visit Uncle Bill, and Uncle Bill tells him, “Every time someone walks through that door, it costs me money.”
So yeah. Think about that one a bit. And remember it was told to someone who had actually walked through that door.
Thanks for that one. If I understand it correctly, the P5+1 (which is not just the United States) will allow companies such as Boeing and Airbus to teach them how to make safety-related repairs to certain airline equipment.
Wow. The horror.
Of course, my father-in-law says “you can’t trust any of 'em”, so they (the Iranians) will, no doubt, use these newly repaired airliners for nefarious purposes.
At least he’s not like…oh, I don’t know, just grab something…not like he was selling anti-aircraft weapons to a hostile nation. That would be treason! The Republicans would be demanding his impeachment, and rightly so!
I had to explain to my stepdad that not all eggs will naturally progress into chickens if you don’t eat them (my wife went vegetarian last year and he was trying to figure out how she decided what she could and couldn’t eat.)
Well, as my father has aged and retired he’s become quite the Fox News viewer. So Thanksgiving dinner was listening to him complain about Obama and such - he used to just complain about government as a whole but has found a need to speak about the adminstration and ‘the big lie’.
The wackiest thing I heard this year was the ‘Obama hates Catholics and is closing the Vatican Embassy’ thing.
At this point, I let it go. He’s old, a bit scared and not well. The two times he tried to pick fights with myself and my younger brothers - he knows we’re lefties with me being the senior one - I cut him off with ‘this won’t accomplish anything so there’s no purpose’. After the second time he just grumped off to watch football and more Fox.
