New Year’s With The President

by Ben Crystal 
By the time you read this, 2014 will be banging on the door like a government storm trooper trying to serve an arrest warrant for removing your home from the power grid. The arrival of a new year often brings not only a chance to reflect on the year that just ducked out the back door, but also to make the usual empty promises we call “New Year’s resolutions.” The average person who bothers tends toward the rote. “This is the year I: quit smoking, lose the weight, cut back on the sauce, finish (insert as-yet-incomplete home improvement project here) and/or become slightly less of a TV-entranced couch potato.” For some people the resolutions might be more ambitious: “This is the year I: start my own business, marry my dream girl, retire and/or become slightly less of a TV-entranced couch potato.”
Being the ruminative sort, I considered the New Year’s resolutions President Barack Obama might make were he the resolution-making sort. I wondered: Would he resolve to come clean about the myriad scandals, disgraces and outright fraud that have marked his Administration like an oversized cattle brand? Perhaps he might resolve to stop treating the Bill of Rights like off-brand toilet paper. He might even resolve to spend less time playing celebrity fun-time in Vegas while Americans die in Libya. But those are the sort of resolutions a man capable of introspection might make. Even a cursory examination of Obama’s tenure thus far reveals a man who not only believes his own cult of personality, but believes in it.

Obama would never make a New Year’s resolution, because a man who can lie that easily about even mundane things (that skeet-shooting picture looked as uncomfortable as Eric Holder driving back across the border after a weekend in Juarez) would never think he had any resolutions to make. The logical next question follows like rape charges after an “Occupy” riot: What resolutions would I want Obama to make?
Sure, I’d like him to resolve to admit that Obamacare is a clumsily executed racket. I’d love to hear him resolve to cough up a few seconds of honesty about something (anything!). Hell, I’d even settle for an Obama resolution to stop wearing “mom jeans” on his bike rides. Isn’t this guy friends with Jay-Z? You know Jay-Z is way too baller for “mom jeans,” yo. But there’s actually only one resolution with which I’d like Barack Obama to kick off 2014: “I, Barack Obama, do hereby resign the Office of the President of the United States; effective immediately.”
Now that would be a happy New Year, indeed.