Obama Derangement Syndrome

Obama Derangement Syndrome---ODS—is a new category of mental illness recently added to the DSM, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the mental health profession's official catalogue. It is a disease afflicting conservative Republicans primarily. The symptoms of ODS are (1) an absolute conviction that anything said by Barack Obama-- “there are 24 hours in a day”, “the earth is round”, “water is wet”-- must be opposed and damned as the utterances of ‘the most radical president in American history’, (2) the condemnation of Obama for not buying into demonstrably absurdist ways of dealing with problems, such as—not taxing the rich makes everyone else prosperous, and (3) a strange combination of loss of short term memory---no recall, for example, of spending the country into debt during the Bush years--- along with distorted long-term memory---the claim, for example, that Washington, Jefferson and other slave-holding Founding fathers fought tirelessly to end slavery. There is no known cure for ODS, although one is being worked on. It’s called voting, and it is intended to keep ODS sufferers far away from any political office that might give them the power to shape the country in the image of their fantasies