du Jour

I Was a Teenage President

The Obama administration resembles nothing so much as a big house in the suburbs where the parents are away for the weekend. In the absence of any responsible person to take charge, the Teenager-In-Chief is letting the rest of the adolescents run wild.

They've maxed out their parents' credit cards and have begun working on their overdraft lines in earnest, as the T-I-C's budget, which proposes a $1.5 trillion deficit for the coming fiscal year, attests. With "What, me worry?" aplomb worthy of a Mad Magazine cover boy, Barack Obama delivered to Congress a bloated document which proposes that more than 40 percent of federal spending be done with borrowed money and some of the rest courtesy of renewed taxes on America's "rich," those people and small businesses making unholy annual incomes greater than $250,000.

And although there are several carloads of bullies pulling into the driveway who are about to enter the premises, the partiers inside remain oblivious to potential threats. They're wrecking the furniture, eating their parents out of house and home, and in general carrying on like there's no tomorrow.

Fraternity Boy General Eric Holder insists, with teen-worthy logic, that trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in U.S. Federal court will demonstrate to the world how wonderfully the impartial American justice system works, this after Holder himself arguably contaminated the pool of potential jurors by declaring that after the trial the "suspect" would be executed. This claim - that KSM was virtually guaranteed to be convicted in an American court of law and even if he wasn't we'd detain him indefinitely anyway - was repeated by the Teenager-In-Chief himself and his Smokesperson, Robert Gates.

In the meantime, the head of Gangland Security, Janet Napolitano, was "still tired" from a pre-Spring Break European jaunt and decided not to appear before a House Committee hearing on the Christmas Day Skivvies Bomber plot, upsetting even House Democrats. These are the same Democrats who are generally on board with the administration's "confiscate and squander" policies, recently ratcheted up from previous "tax and spend" levels. And it's worth noting that Chief of Stuff Rahm Emanuel nixed the idea floated in a recent staff meeting that the administration consider marketing novelty underwear packed with faux explosives in order to generate money to help reduce projected budget shortfalls. Oh, those crazy kids.

Under new laws governing parents' rights with regard to their adolescent children, the Teenager-In-Chief's academic records can't be sent home without the student's consent. That has led to a great deal of speculation about whether the T-I-C really did complete the requirements for his college degrees, and if he did so, whether he distinguished himself as a student. Even though we footed the bill for our adolescent's education and are paying for the consequences thereof, we haven't been afforded so much as a glimpse at the papers he wrote or the marks he received for them.

And though we had our doubts about some of the characters he's hung out with, The New York Teens assured us that no permanent damage had been done by his association with the likes of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and political radical Bill Ayers. And no, the Teens added, Bill Ayers didn't write Obama's autobiography, and he certainly didn't write his college papers. Heck, Ayers and Obama didn't even meet each other until Obama was well on his way to the stunning success he achieved in his early career as a community organizer. How in the world could Ayers have written Obama's college papers, tell me that? And they surely wouldn't have let Obama teach constitutional law - at the University of Chicago, no less - if he wasn't qualified, would they?

I mean, jeez, what more do you want? The T-I-C is already working harder than he ever thought he would have to. He barely has time for golf and pickup basketball games and date nights any more, and you know how important those are to any teen. So of course he's angry.

He's angry at the overwhelming problems he "inherited" from the previous administration. And he's angry because, despite the fact that he had bulletproof majorities in both houses of Congress, the American public was too stupid to understand his health care initiative and the wonderful things it would do for them, and so he couldn't get that legislation pushed through.

Never mind that his anger is the anger of manufactured intellectual outrage unconnected to real-world experience. And never mind that it's the anger of psychological pain born in the midst of privilege few generations in the history of our planet have ever enjoyed. It is ultimately an unpleasant and whiny anger, the anger of a rich kid bitching that his parents haven't given him quite enough, the anger of a spoiled child who denigrates those who came before him for not being what he thinks they should have been. He's the Teenager-In-Chief, and he's not about to let you forget it.