The Theme of Today's Post is "Offensive"

I'm not the only person getting tired of the presidential election campaigning, but my experience has an extra dash of spicy irritation. Namely, the Scots.

Scottish people are avidly following this election, as I imagine are citizens of many other nations. Interestingly, I don't give a toss about elections for Parliament in England or other parts of the UK (probably because it has zero effect on my life).

However, when I meet the locals, the first question they ask me after they've ascertained I'm not Australian (?) is who I'm voting for in the upcoming election. They're completely fascinated. They seem to uniformly believe that Americans are stupid because of George Bush. I keep having to remind them that 50% (or more) of us did NOT vote for Bush. More distressing still is the seeming widely held belief that the US government was actually responsible for 9/11 and that our government somehow orchestrated the whole thing, just as we apparently deliberately orchestrated the whole banking industry meltdown so that we could purposely take down the rest of the world in a global recession.

I hope that I'm just meeting local freaks and not people who are voicing the common opinion. Either way, it's pretty offensive, at least the 9/11 part. I really hate talking to conspiracy theorist freaks. They are SO SURE of themselves. They speak like they truly know all the facts. It's like when my brother Matt says "Trust me!" and I immediately don't.

My question is, when did America turn off our beacon in the night?

Which brings me to a conversation that I had with a pilot I was flying with recently. We were in Scotland and had just been accosted by a local who wanted to know (of course) who we were voting for. El Capitan said that he sort of liked Obama but that the rest of his party scared the sh*t out of him. I rolled my eyes so hard that I got a little dizzy and immediately felt compelled to tell him that HIS party scared the crap out of me. Then he decided to tell us all how he felt about the media:

"I went to engineering school. Now, my friends who weren't so good with numbers and couldn't handle all the math, they decided to go get an MBA. Now, those guys that still couldn't handle all that math, you know what they decided to do?? They decided to go Journalism school! They became journalists! I think journalists have ZERO intelligence! They are SO DUMB! They write the exact opposite of things I have truly experienced!"

Well, maybe. But honestly, I found this beyond the pale, for about a million reasons, but mostly because I majored in journalism for a semester or two, I have a brother who IS a member of the so-called 'dumb' media and probably went to a better university than El Capitan, and further, I (mostly) believe what our left-leaning media says (with a few healthy pinches of salt thrown in rather than the requisite grain).

So, I'm sick of feeling offended and would like for people to stop being so up-front with their yahoo opinions. Frankly, just shut up. You all sound like idiots.