President of Precedent

People give the President a really difficult time about the crappy state of the economy, the incredible surge in poverty, and the sickening unemployment rate. But you guys need to realize that being a President is haaaard. Real hard. Especially when the Republicans spent eight years setting up a situation that would make the Democrats look like morons in only a few months. But fair is fair—surely, it’s perfectly presidential to whine about everything, right?

	“So what [Republicans] instead said was, we’ll just let [Democrats] try it out, and we’re not going to lift a finger to help, and because they figured [they] had made such a mess it’s going to take [us] a really long time to clean it up.”
	“The South has already marched into and burned Washington and is miles from New York. A lot of the pundits are saying, ‘Hey, Abe—why don’t you use the Army to protect us?’ And maybe that is a good idea. But I inherited this mess from Buchanan, and he didn’t seem to need the Army. Why is it okay for him, but not okay for me?”
	“So a lot of you are wondering why we don’t reach out to China and the Soviets, and you know, kind of settle tensions there before we get involved in a bigger conflict than Vietnam. Well, just so you know, I didn’t get us into this Cold War. We inherited this mess from the Democrats, who had eight years to fix it. And I gotta focus like a laser on inflation.”
	“You know, it’s getting pretty easy for folks to criticize us, and say we should go in there and get Iraq out of Kuwait. Real easy. Well, you know what isn’t easy? Cleaning up a mess made by my predecessor, who felt it was okay to ramp up Iraq into the world’s sixth largest military. Well, now it’s not that easy, is it? Certainly it’s not something we’re going to get done in just two or three years.”
	“Getting real easy for people on the internet to criticize me and suggest that maybe I should have stopped the British from impressing our navy. But you gotta remind folks that this didn’t start with me. This is something that I got handed to me from the administration of the last eight years. You can’t expect a decisive turnaround, especially when there’s more important things to worry about, like dealing with the banks.”