Only in America

I almost never read about or comment on politics, except when Sarah Palin was running for Vice President and that whole event was like a hilarious drama that would only happen once in a lifetime.

Today something has made my eyes popped out, again.

When I was a college chick back in Beijing over 20 years ago, I used to love reading a column in the Reader's Digest called "Only in America". Occasionally I'd get a good laugh when I could actually understand something with my shabby English.

I had the same feeling earlier today, till I realized that it wasn't a joke -- President Obama ACTUALLY DID win the Nobel Peace Prize!

As someone has wisely pointed out, the deadline to nominate the candidates was Feb 1st, 09 and we all know the the President did not swear in till Jan 20th. If you are interested in his achievements during those glorious 12 days in great detail, well it basically involved partying, going to meetings, skipping church, releasing federal funding to pay for abortions in foreign countries, and then partying some more.

It took Jimmy Carter more than 20 years to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Al Gore, who shared the Prize two years ago with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had spent years banging the drum on global warming and other environmental dilemmas. How could the Nobel Committee even consider someone who hasn't done anything yet?

Let us see, only in America....

...that the former President could barely talk in public, while the current one basically knocked our socks off by merely "talking";

...that the former President should have been impeached for "inventing" a war that cost hundreds of thousands of casualties and the US tax payers trillions of dollars, while the current one got rewarded for achievements that he has not even accomplished.... yet.

It looks like the President is (and most likely continuous to be) judged not by who he really is and what he has done, but rather by who WE THINK he might be and what he could do out of our wish.

It feels like a bad joke, like the President has been set up sky high for walking high wires with people all over the world staring at him from below to see how he would balance himself and not fall from grace.

I don't know why in the world you'd want to be the President now, or the Fed Governor same time last year.