Last night, Barack ‘Boom’ Obama telephoned a McGill student journalist to demand more “breathtaking” analysis on “that stuff going on” in Afghanistan.
The student, Alexpanda Coat-Hanger, is a regular contributor to Montreal based political-gossip blog, the Political Soup.
Coat-Hanger is the Soup’s self-anointed expert on “the Middle East, and also the developing world [sic].”
Obama told The Twice-a-Weekly that he is “astounded” that an undergraduate student and contributor to a blog had such insight into “almost all of the world.”
“This kid really has got something,” Obama said. “I have the most well-funded departments in the entire world, and yet when we looked at the problems in the places, we just couldn’t see. We couldn’t see like this kid.”
“I read his article, ‘The Balancing Act,’ yesterday and I have to say, I was blown away,” Obama said.
In the article, Coat-Hanger expounds his view that “the failures” in Afghanistan should be blamed on both the West and the Karzai regime which holds power in the country.
“This is really a radical take on the situation in Afghanistan,” Obama said. “But when we looked at his argument, and then compared it to the way that things are over there, we found he was right.”
Obama noted that he was particularly impressed with Coat-Hanger’s use of assumptions and received truths to back up his analysis.
“I was also very impressed with the way the kid dealt with the question of legitimacy; the question of why America was justified in taking the fire out over there to the sandy places,” Obama said. “He just didn’t even acknowledge the question. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Even our finest departments and their finest heads haven’t been able to completely dodge that question.”
Obama is now understood to be making an offer of employment to Coat-Hanger, but is worried that the rival Montreal-based political-gossip blog Pencil might land him first.
“We have indeed been preparing a move for Coat-Hanger,” Paneer Tie-el-b, founder of Pencil, told The Twice-a-Weekly.
“We’ve actually been sizing up a move for Coat-Hanger for quite a while, since we were founded, actually [last week],” Tie-el-b said. “We knew one or two of the big shots might come in for him, but we thought it would probably be the Prince Albert Herald, not the President of the United States of America.”
Tie-el-b noted that Pencil welcomed the competition from the Commander-in-Chief of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, stating that “right now, we think the balance tips slightly in our favour.”
Prising Coat-Hanger away from his current blog might not be so easy, with the Political Soup making it clear they do not want to sacrifice their man.
“We have been preparing an offer we think he can’t refuse,” the Soup’s chief editor, I-am-a-Bell So-lick-me, said. “Guestlist at Tokyo every week, plus a $50 meal plan card for the Orange-Road cafe.”
At press time, Obama was not sure if the United States of America, comprised of the fifty states and significant parts of the rest of the world, would be able to match So-lick-me’s offer, but he said he would “seek advice as soon as possible.”
“Unfortunately,” Obama said, “Coat-Hanger is the only man I can trust to give me the right advice.”