I would like to bid our fearless leader a not-so-fond farewell by ending our eight years together with a list of the nicknames I not-so-affectionately bestowed upon him during the course of the time in which he had influence over my life.
Ride off into the sunset, HisHighness. I truly hope that I never see or hear from you again. Oh, and for all of you libs out there, my disdain is for the lacking of his character, not the color of his skin. Thank goodness that for at least the next four years, when I disagree with Taco Bowls, you won’t all immediately think I am a racist.
Who can forget when the Bush girls revealed to the world that their mom’s nickname for their dad was “Bushie”? I still call George the Great Satan Junior that to this day. So, when it came time for a new President to take office in 2009, I lazily just applied the same moniker to him until I learned a bit more about him. Hence, HisHigness’s first nickname was “Obamie”.
But that nickname did not last long at all. After watching our new President get a Nobel Peace Prize for simply winning the election and having a new skin color for an American President, and then going on a whirlwind apology tour where he bowed to everyone from Saudia Arabia to Japan and back again, I applied the new official nickname of “The Leader”. This was a two-part nickname. One part was to serve in irony for the complete and total lack of leadership I felt HisHigness showed on the world stage during that first year by calling him “The Leader”. The second was a very affectionate nod to my love of The Simpsons and an episode where Homer and a large number of the town’s people followed a highly unqualified false prophet and cult leader known as “The Leader”. I really felt this nickname was apt and thought it might stick for some time, but alas, it would not last long, either.
By the end of 2009, it was becoming apparent that HisHighness had sold everyone on all of the amazing magic that he was going to accomplish – things like transparency and reaching across the aisle. These were some of the very reasons that a lot of people voted for him, but by now, it was becoming apparent that none of these magical concepts were going to come to fruition. Also, it was becoming apparent that some of the other magic reasons that people had voted for him – race baiting come to an end, people not having to make their car payments, and everyone getting free cell phones – were not coming to fruition, either. And henceforth, at least until the next nickname, I knew HisHighness as “The Magician”. Of course, this nickname was also thanks to the magic of what we would later come to know as Obamacare.
Here is an excerpt from my December 5, 2009 blog post: “I call him The Magician because I think the only way for his Healthcare initiatives to work as he is selling them would be through magic. He says that he is going to find and cut all of the existing spending necessary to pay for $1 trillion in new spending after the money has already been spent (a common practice of politicians who end up never cutting the existing spending after the fact), cram people who have no money to pay for services into the healthcare system without increasing its capacity, and somehow reduce the cost of care to the people who are paying for the system, and somehow still increase the quality of care that everyone is receiving. There is only one way that this can be achieved...magic!”
Not long after being christened as “The Magician”, HisHighness was christened “The Messiah”. This was his nickname for a small chunk of 2010 that stemmed from the fact that despite the realization that the healthcare reform magic numbers were never going to come to fruition, people still blindly followed HisHighness no matter what. Everyone was realizing that it was all a magic show, but rather than criticize, they had faith and kept following no matter what. They kept telling us to have faith, too – to give him time – he had only been in office for a little while, but was still going to accomplish his miracles despite the odds, kind of like you-know-who.
I shook my head as his followers offered no words of criticism and began to accuse anyone who did criticize with a certain form of –ism. But it was actually a movie – a Russell Crowe movie at that – that would end HisHighness’s “The Messiah” nickname and convert it to “The Master & Commander”. That was the movie where Russell Crowe played a ship’s captain – its master and commander, if you will – during which no matter what happened, no matter how bad his mistakes were, and no matter how much he harmed the ship and its crew, he still thumped his chest and said he was “The Master & Commander”. Come hell or high water, we were stuck with this horrible captain.
“The Master & Commander” nickname actually stuck the longest of any of the early nicknames, though from 2010 to the early part of 2012, I peppered in some other nicknames like “The Weakling-In-Chief” and “The Fence-Sitter In Chief”.
But, it was during a little thing known as the U.S. Presidential election of 2012 that the next nickname became painfully apparent. It was started when a certain hopeful female presidential candidate’s staffers, I am sure with absolutely no blessing whatsoever in any way, shape or form from her, started to once again bring up questions about HisHighness’s birthplace. The fact that I read some bits and pieces of that propaganda autobio book and watched a lot of news footage of HisHighness’s ancestral homeland probably also helped me bestow upon him the name of “The Kenyan”.
And “The Kenyan” nickname he would remain until HisHighness came out and said that he was sick and tired of everyone calling his horrible Affordable Care Act debacle Obamacare. As the man tried to distance himself from his namesake legacy legislation as we all came to realization that we were right about how bad it sucked, he wanted us to stop calling it Obamacare, so I started calling him “Obamacare” instead, so we would never forget who gave us the steaming pile that it still remains to this day.
I did call HisHighness “Obamacare” for quite some time, but in December of 2013, I lovingly began to call him “President What’s-His-Name”. That truly stemmed from the fact that at this point, a good chunk into his second term, I was truly ready for a change and because I was thinking what most of us were thinking - isn’t it time for “President What’s-His-Name” to go already?
I know I switched back and forth from all of the nicknames at this point for a little while as well, but it was in December of 2015, motivated by all of the presidential orders that he decreed upon us once he could not get the rest of his legacy laws passed legally, that I began to call him “HisHighness”. And that is the name that has stuck through to today, HisHighness’s last day in office.
The man who took office with so much hope for change – that this time, it was going to be different – not only gave us very little transparency, but also gave us such ironies as forcing his will on a majority of people that did not agree with him through decree and becoming the first Nobel Peace Prize Winner with a kill list and drones that rained death from above. Truly, he was a king’s king, ruling the land with privilege like $100 million in tax-payer funded vacations all the while blaming everything that went wrong during his reign on the privilege of others and doing more to divide his people than any other leader in their history.
So, HisHighness, today, I bid you and all of your nicknames farewell. Today, I celebrate the end of your ability to influence our lives and divide the people of this great land.
Graphic by Public Domain Pictures via Pixabay
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