I'm not sure if everybody actually thinks a pregnant teenager marrying her high school sweetheart is SO 1949, so retro, or if the media and the politicians just keep pretending we're all dumb enough to think that. It's not scandalous, unusual or irresponsible. People of all ages do this nowadays, always have.

Just notice one thing: Bristol is smiling. What makes Bristol smile is that she ISN'T living in 1949. She has all the rights the Republicans fought so hard to oppose. Marriage to some goofball at 17 is OK because we have laws now against domestic violence, a husband can't prevent a life-saving abortion, and divorce is a relatively pain-free option because Bristol might actually be able to make a living for herself.

But some women don't have these rights yet; education and good careers come to girls from "good neighborhoods." Palin's kids are the poster children for middle-class smugness, and that's all Republican propaganda is anyway.

I don't begrudge Sarah Palin's beautiful family or courageous choices. But I'm disturbed by her obvious attempt to pass off her daughter's previous pregnancy as her own. That's another feature of 1949: Lies. Little old ladies and Republicans show us the past as some kind of Technicolor, "Meet Me in St. Louis" world that we supposedly yearn for. The past sanctioned alcoholism, dysfunctionality and rape; it threatened our grandmas with volence and sold them into slavery. Obama won't go there because he doesn't have to; the fantasy will implode on its own.

When propaganda and lies fuel the Culture Wars, they seep into other issues. Republicans whitewash Iraq, Katrina, and race relations, too. Fresh in from the better suburbs of Disneyland, they tell pretty lies about the "free market" economy and who benefits from their tax cuts.

I'm living in 2008, in reality-land, and I'm voting for Obama.

Pass me a double, Kate, for the times she said "second Holocaust" in response to the Iranian threat against Israel. And a beer chaser, because it directly quoted McCain's equally disgusting comparison. Shouldn't it be enough to state one's support for Israel if aggression breaks out?

Or are we all too numbed by now to the history-exploiting Republican road show?

Maybe I can use the word "lynching" next time someone discusses racial economic equality in this country. Or make reference to cannibalism about, I don't know, banks getting eaten up by other banks. And I can yell "rape!" during the next date in which I have to pay.

At long last, ma'am, have you no sense of embarrassment?

Just because you use the word "Holocaust" doesn't make you an expert on Middle East affairs. And "Joe Sixpack" doesn't mark you as a champion of the working class. "Hockey moms" are mean, but are they smart? Cut it out with the small-town homilies, because I'm from a small town (a hockey town, even) I'm not impressed. Who buys this crap?

I never doubt for a moment that Joe Biden has a vocabulary at his disposal that could rival Sarah Palin's. He chooses not to use it. His breakdown over his family's fate wasn't just genuine, it was angry, as in, "How dare this woman score points on family values after what I've been through?

Finally, finally, they've gone too far and made caricatures of themselves. Set 'em up, Joe. Straight up.

I'm getting really sinister vibes about all the videos disappearing lately. Please tell me it ain't so, that I'm imagining things . . . or that I'm imagining that, through this ACORN "scandal," the Republicans are going to steal another election. The time to get really bugged about all this was eight years ago. I'm beyond horrified.

On a personal note, everything has gone surreal. I have survived a partial going-underground of my psyche to survive these past 25 years. And now my boyfriend is telling me it's OK to steal elections if his side wins, Obama is definitely a terrorist, and McCain just didn't know what was going on in that room when he and five other Senators intimidated the Keating bank examiners. All poor people are "buttheads," he says, and it's all their fault for buying big houses they couldn't afford. And by the way, that "community organizing" Obama did didn't accomplish a thing.

There's a clear, polarizing line being drawn in this country right now and it scares me. For just a couple of days I thought it was funny how the damaged people of America were getting together at Palin rallies and shouting their neuroses. It's not funny anymore. People are coming unhinged.

When reality is too hard to take, human beings go into hypnotic trances. They don't respond to what is in front of them but to ideals and symbols. Need we be reminded of the bloody history of this phenomenon?