Because partisanship stops at the water’s edge (except for Hawaii)

France’s President Sarkozy is moping. Everybody likes Barry better than him.

France has been cooing along with everyone else over the arrival of Bo Obama at the White House, but the master of America’s new First Dog is no longer in good odour [sic] with President Sarkozy.

Mr Sarkozy is pouring cold water on President Obama’s efforts to recast American leadership on the world stage, depicting them as unoriginal, unsubstantial and overrated. Behind leaks and briefings from the Elysée Palace lies Mr Sarkozy’s irritation at the rock-star welcome that Europe gave Mr Obama on his Europan [sic] tour earlier this month.

…Personal pique and French politics are also behind the souring of Mr Sarkozy’s self-promoted honeymoon with the United States. On the personal side, the French President is needled by the adulation for an unproven US leader whose stardom has eclipsed what he sees as his established record as a world troubleshooter. “The President is annoyed by what he sees as the naivety and the herd mentality of the media,” said a journalist who is privy to Elysée thinking.

Now, look. I strongly disagree with Barack Obama and his “policies,” a word I use loosely in this context because I don’t think he actually has any. No direction. No compass. No plan. He’s flying by the seat of his pants, and screwing things up both domestically and on the world scene. The ramifications will extend well beyond my generation’s lifetime unless somebody with some sense straightens it out. At the very least, do no harm. Somebody write that on a post-it note and stick it onto the President’s bathroom mirror.

But y’know what, President Sarkozy? Shut the hell up. Obama may be the second coming of Jimmy Carter. He may be flushing our economic toilet just because he likes watching the pretty blue water swirl. But he’s ours. We – well, some of us – elected him. My neighbors voted for him – the ones who live just across the street, who fly a gay pride flag sometimes and who put Tammy Baldwin signs in their yard. They’re the ones who yelled at a woman who was walking away without cleaning up the poop her dog left in my yard once. Yelled at her, and made her go back and clean it up. My yard. I wasn’t even home. They voted Obama.

Yes, I think that was a bad decision on their part (the voting, not the yelling), but here in America, we reserve the right to make bad decisions. We respect each other’s bad decisions. Making bad decisions is part and parcel with being who we are. We embrace it, and then we do something about it ourselves, and we don’t give a rat’s butt what other people think about it.

Can I ask you something? What the hell has your country ever done to make the world a better place? Unless “making everyone else look relatively polite and hygienic in comparison” is an acceptable answer, I can’t think of a single thing. Not. One. Thing.

Let’s see you step up and take on Afghanistan. Let’s see your navy (you do have one, right?) start patrolling the Horn of Africa. How much is your country spending to combat AIDS worldwide? When your economy nods off a little does the rest of the world fall into a narcoleptic coma? No?

Didn’t think so.

Do yourself a favor, President Sarkozy: just sit there, smile, be happy that people think you’re Salman Rushdie, wife-wise. Be glad we aren’t throwing up some 90% tariffs against your country. We make wine, too. And champagne, and cheese, and we’ve got rude smelly people of our own. We don’t need yours.

Hey, I get it: jealousy is as much a part of the human condition as body odor. I understand that. It must be hard for you to always take a back seat to the American president. First it was that ridiculous cowboy, and now it’s an untested kid. As far as you figure, you’re better than both of them. Yet, they both run circles around you. How can that be?

Because they’re Americans, you frog dweeb. We create more, we consume more, we win more, we do more. We’re the big kids on the block – not because we always make the right decisions, but because we have the resources, and the people, and the culture that lets us succeed even when we have a socialist in the White House. In America, all you need is a screwdriver and a pair of pliers and maybe a little patch of ground someplace, and you can make a fortune. Live large in gold-plated mansions. We can (and frequently do) move from trailer trash to tabloid trash in a single generation. Sometimes faster.

Americans are arrogant? Duh. Of course we’re arrogant. There’s a reason for that. You’d be arrogant, too, if you were us.

We’ll handle our bumbling socialist president in our own time, in our own way. Until then, maybe you just start calling him sir. Because next time, we’re going to send a pretty little girl with a hillbilly husband over there. Or maybe we’ll find somebody whose ears stick out even further than Obama’s. Or we’ll thaw out some fossil whose hair hasn’t moved in 20 years.

And you know what? They’ll run circles around you, too.