An American Lion

I read this and I thought it was parody. It is parody, right? Someone’s going to reveal that this is a joke from those unfunny bastards at the Onion, right? I will pull this if that’s the case.

Talk about cojones:

US President Barack Obama, in remarks aired late Sunday, awarded himself a B plus for his first 11 months in office, stressing in an interview with talk show queen Oprah Winfrey that there was still much to be done.

“A good solid B plus,” Obama said during an hour-long, intimate soft-focus ABC network Christmas at the White House special, when Winfrey asked what grade he would give himself.

Explaining why he wouldn’t give himself top marks, the president said his administration had “inherited the biggest set of challenges of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt” which they were still working on.

He had earned good points for helping to stabilize the economy, setting a path out of Iraq and restoring America’s international image, but the job was not yet finished.

“B plus because of the things that are undone. Health care is not yet signed. If I get health care passed, we tip into A minus,” Obama said, his hair visibly grayer than when he took office on January 20.

Americans out of work, Americans at war, Americans hurting because their benefits have run out, Americans dying because their health insurance has been yanked out from under them, millions in jeopardy of being homeless, bankrupt, broke or abandoned. A financial system still out of whack and broken. Home values in the toilet. Retirement savings gone. Old people having to go back to work. Poverty and misery a fact of life in vast stretches of middle America. Kids going hungry, paranoia and guns on the news every day, demagogues and charlatans running around with vast numbers of disenchanted followers. A country so divided it doesn’t even look like America anymore.

And then to say, “If I get health care passed…” this man will upgrade himself—like any good professor would, I suppose—to an A minus.

If I? And then an A minus?

What, there’s no Congress involved here? Apparently not. And you get an A minus for sucking wind and blowing it and letting your political opposition up off the mat and letting your own party twist in the wind?

I usually ignore the carping of people who talk about President Obama as if he is stuck on himself, but, wow.

Talk about hubris. This President has utterly, utterly failed to take on the big problems. He has failed to stand up to the generals and take away their war. His stimulus has been too little, too late, to the wrong areas of the economy. His bailout of Wall Street has become a populist rallying cry. He has failed to make the big difference that he promised to make. He’s had a great social season. His Christmas is going to be fabulous, I gather. Oh, such pretty speeches—the best ever, of course. But he should have the modesty to say that this was not a year to be proud of, what with all of the failure and the dying and the misery in this country that has been ignored.

This was not the sort of year you would call substantive. It’s a little like having Tiger Woods say that this has been a great year for love or having Courtney Love say that it’s been a great year for parenting.