Sometimes it seems like a twisted Twilight Zone episode. Go back 50 years ago, and weave a wild story of the future, in which governments condemn the Boy Scouts, and celebrates perversions and buggery. Nah, nobody would believe it!
It seems to me that the majority of what goes on would have been considered too far out for fiction fifty years ago. The Obama presidency is approximately equivalent to what would have happened had we elected a German spy who refused to document his birth or anything else about his past during WWII.