Press three for When Will This All Be Over … Press four for Who Cares … Press five for more options.

Now I am guessing I am probably like a lot of you … I hate pressing option after option after option on a telephone call, before I get to a real person … who may or may not speak English.

Between the hurricane that just went through and the election that is not quite through, my index finger and voice have been getting quite the workout.

So the big question … Does this count as daily exercise for the diet I try to follow? Or does it somehow work into my daily allowances?

So hurricane calls are protein and election calls are empty carbs?

What do emails count as? Certainly not vegetables …. maybe fruits. Some definitely seem fruity to me. The one I got this morning from a distinguished relative was definitely nuts.

It went something like this …  well exactly like this:

Gotta be the dumbest fools to ever hold the office of President, anywhere. How embarrassing it is to have this as our President and first lady! But I guess, when you’ve never done the Pledge of Allegiance, you don’t know what to do!

Maybe it’s the Muslim way.

At first I thought the picture was reversed, but the wedding rings indicate that it’s right, as do the buttons on his suit.

I am so embarrassed to know that this is our President. Only 21 days to correct this, November 6th, 2012!

THANK YOU and God Bless America!!

And it came with this picture:

And people really believe this stuff … this thinly veiled racism.

Like the birthers who, despite tons of evidence to the contrary, insist on saying he is not a natural-born American. Or that despite the fact that he was raised by mainstream Protestant Christians, and is a mainstream Protestant Christian … they insist that he really is a Muslim. Even his father had not practiced that for decades.

But when I read the “dumbest fools to ever hold …” comment combined with “God Bless America”, well, blame it on lack of caffeine, or the end of daylight savings time, or the endless commercials and robocalls, but I had to react.

Had to.

Even when President George W Bush was doing things that were, shall we say, less than stellar, I still respected the fact that he was for better or worse our President.

First I went to Snopes to get the truth which, of course, was that the picture was photo-shopped. This is the real picture.

Then I wrote a reply … and did a Reply All. It went something like this … OK, exactly like this. 

Well, I checked this out since it seemed pretty unbelievable that a Harvard educated man would do this … and actually … he didn’t. It IS a photo-shopped picture.  

Look closely and you will see that Michelle’s hair is parted on the wrong side … she parts it on the other side. And if you still don’t believe me look closely at the Marine behind the President. He is wearing his uniform backwards … with the medals on the wrong side of his chest.

Now if it had stopped there, it would have probably been fine, but no, I was operating on a snark deficiency, so I added this:

But then, there are so many falsehoods going around … like Romney putting his dog on the roof of the car, or wondering why airplane windows don’t go down, or calling veterans, servicemen and retired folks the 47%, or saying Jeep is sending all its jobs to China when they are not, or offending our best ally in Europe (England) by insulting them in the Olympics, or flip-flopping on his policies, or saying he would eliminate funding to Public Broadcasting and eliminate FEMA … oh wait … those are all true.

No more invites to family reunions for me, I’m thinking.