Back to the rumors again.

On the television  in his living room, Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

"It's like you're hearing about two different men with nothing in common," Peterman said. "It makes it impossible to figure out what's true, or what you can believe."

As a fellow Middle American, let me step up and say this: if you believe that Obama is a Muslim, unpatriotic, a terrorist, not born in America, any of the various rumors floating around about him, you are an ignorant, bigoted A giving in to the worst temptations of society, no matter how coddled they are by people unwilling to offend you lest they seem like the sort of elitist who doesn’t obsess over whether or not Negroes with funny names are going to kill you in your sleep. Facts don’t seem to work, so I’m more than willing to try abject shame for being unrepentant dumbassery.

Once upon a time in blogland, which was 3 million years ago in blogtime, back around the time when Howard Dean was ANGRY and all of his supporters were possessed by BUSH DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, completely blinded by irrational hatred and anger, there was a lot of talk about how A like me needed to be nicer and sweeter in order to reach out to those nice Midwestern folks who didn't read my sucky blog anyway. But the fact is that much of our politics has for some years been unrepentant dumbassery, even if much of it comes out of the mouths of leading mainstream media figures like Brian Williams and Maureen Dowd. There's no reasoning with it, no being nice to it. It isn't useful to simply throw up an argument or competing narrative.