ON BEING A JACKASS

"Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but stand there and take it." Lyndon Johnson

So President Obama thinks that Kanye West is a jackass? Big deal. I think so too. Why the uproar? All he said is exactly what so many of us are thinking. When you become president are you no longer allowed to have honest, spontaneous opinions and express them? Ever?

He said it off the record, but it shouldn't be such a big deal that he said it. This country is messed up in more ways than the economy. The most interesting thing about the incident is that it happened via Twitter. Twitter is like the slambook of the new millenium. It gets people in trouble and everybody is doing it.

I wonder if there's some freak twittering about his weird stalking obsessions and when he finally goes and acts out we can go back and read his twitter feed.

But back to the president who said what we were all thinking. I like Obama when he openly speaks his mind. It reminds me of why I voted for him. Even when I disagree with him he's still an intelligent human being and he's real. He doesn't strike me as a guy with entitlement issues, or someone who talks out of both sides of his mouth - when he's just saying what he really thinks.

Being president has got to be no fun at all, as Lyndon Johnson so aptly describes it - standing in a hail storm and taking it will leave you cold and bruised. Good thing Obama seems to have a pretty thick skin - but I wonder where his "when" is, that moment where he'll just get fed up and tell us all off. How long can one deal with the level of sanctimonious bullshit that's flying around before one snaps?

The behavior in this country has devolved to a point where Kanye West feels like it's okay to climb up on stage, in the middle of someone else's moment and spew his opinion. We live in a world where people twitter their every thought and our news anchors are no longer reporting hard, fact based news - much of it just opinion. The opinion of Rupert Murdoch, or Sumner Redstone, or whomever else owns the company.

At this point I think even Kanye West would acknowledge that what he did to Taylor Swift makes him a jackass.

But maybe he's also the poster child for America's collective conscious.