The Cool War

America is cool. President Barack Obama is really cool. Young people turned out to vote for Obama because they had heard, via Jon Stewart, that Barack Obama was cool and that Republicans were uncool.

Now, Obama’s supporters are finding it increasingly difficult to continue to lie for him, to cover up for him, to pretend that being cool is what really matters.

They voted for Obama because he was cool and now they are discovering the downside of cool. If cool is all you bring to the table, someone is see it as an opportunity to eat your lunch.

Of course, there is something very convenient about this. Obama will never run again. The media titans who promoted him as the great hope need to recover their own tarnished credibility.

Otherwise, how will they be able to sell America on another incompetent, unqualified presidential candidate?

Now, Vladimir Putin has offered his own view of Obama’s cool. Since Putin’s op-ed appears in The Onion we may assume that it reflects the youngster elite’s disillusionment with their putative Messiah.

Of course, The Onion does not exactly call out President Obama for his cool. That would perhaps require a greater willingness to recognize previous mistakes.

Most Onion readers, however, know which foreign leader is the prince of Cool.

In his op-ed the Pseudo-Putin thanks the cool Western leaders for the way they dealt with his annexation of Crimea:

It’s certainly no easy task to forcefully annex an entire province against another country’s will, so I just wanted to thank you—the government of the United States, the nations of western Europe, and really the entire world population as a whole—for being super cool about all of this.

The pseudo-Putin also appreciates the fecklessness of a cool Western foreign policy:

Believe me, I know it must have been hard to stand idly by and do nothing as a foreign military invaded one of your allies, or just sit back and watch while we set up a complete farce of a referendum—a referendum supervised by heavily armed members of the Russian military, mind you—and used it as grounds for backdoor annexation. It also couldn’t have been easy to keep your cool when we sent commandos to raid the Ukrainian naval headquarters in Crimea. But you didn’t really make much of a fuss over any of it, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. It made my job way, way easier.

He understands that the Western allies, led by the fearless Barack Obama must pretend to be acting forcefully. He knows better than to take it seriously:

I also understand that moving forward, you’ll feel pressure to call a lot of high-profile NATO meetings, make statements to the UN, suspend this summer’s G8 summit, that sort of thing. I also get that all that kind of stuff is just a formal procedure you have to follow, because really, at this point you’ve laid your cards on the table. So I just want to thank you ahead of time—honestly, from the bottom of my heart—for ensuring that I can just concentrate on doing whatever I want in any formerly Soviet region that is of geopolitical, military, or economic value to Russia without having to worry one iota about suffering any consequences. Thanks for making that 100-percent clear to me.

Unsurprisingly, the pseudo-Putin is not worried about losing the new Cool War:

But you know, I really shouldn’t have been surprised, given how cool you were with my longstanding record of handling opposition political groups or independent-minded journalists, all those gay rights protests that cropped up last year, or even that whole ordeal in 2008 when we tried to take over separatist regions of Georgia by force. Just knowing I’m free to do things my own way—that I can fully ignore any domestic or international laws and any basic principles of human rights—just takes away a ton of the stress involved in making these big decisions.

If you think that that was bad, take a look at Jimmy Fallon’s parody of an Obama-Putin negotiation.