Have you heard of this?

FLOTUS for Senate?

It wasn’t that long ago that such a slogan would seem absurd, but political wags are beginning to wonder whether Michelle Obama is mulling a run for Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk’s seat in 2016.

I’m still living in “not that long ago” because the whole thing sounds beyond absurd to me. I happen to live in Illinois and I kind of prefer to have people representing our state who are actual politicians. I must be horribly outdated and not ready to face the reality of politics turning into an unadulterated reality-TV show that I myself predicted recently.

I’m so upset right now, people, that I need to vent here on the blog because I’m not very fit to talk live to human beings at this moment. I have a lot to do today and it’s a very tough day as it is, so I need to get over this soon.

Today is the 9-month anniversary of my C-section, so I’m already just hanging in there, kind of. And then I just had to find out that an acquaintance has been using what happened to me, my tragedy, for manipulative purposes. It tuns out that this creature was so traumatized by what I had do undergo that this is somehow an excuse for her treating people in a shitty way. It is not a nice feeling to find out that I’m being trotted out, without even being informed about it, to justify stinky behavior on somebody’s part.

I’ve been making enormous efforts not to turn my tragedy into everybody else’s. I have been completely professional at work and never shirked my duties even minimally, although if everybody ever had an excuse to do so, that would be me. I have not forced anybody to become a hostage of my emotional states, I have not treated anybody shabbily because I’m sad, I’m dealing with everything with the help of people who have offered help. And now this sorry excuse for a human being is using the death of my child as a self-serving mechanism. 

And if this at least were a relative or a close friend who does have a genuine emotional response to the situation, I could understand that. This person, however, is a very distant acquaintance with whom I have maybe talked a dozen times in my entire life. And by the way, right after it happened, she behaved in a very poor way towards me, too. 

It’s OK, I will deal with it, just like I’ve always dealt with everything else. But God, how I hate these spoiled divas who need to exploit the problems of others because they’ve never had any of their own.

Why does the new President of Ukraine have to be sworn in on the Bible? What’s with the stupid parroting of the Americans? The Bible means something to many Americans, which is why there is at least a logic to having it at the inauguration. In Ukraine, the Bible has meant nothing to the overwhelming majority for almost 100 years.

Nothing disgusts me more that this ridiculous need to fake an interest in religion among the post-Soviet people. Whenever I see Putin make the sign of the cross, I just feel creeped out. Do Ukrainians have to follow down this path of complete idiocy (and sacrilegious profanation, by the way)?

I spend so much time at the gym these days and there are so many TV screens there that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is now like a relative. Fox News can now abandon the dead-end stories about Benghazi and IRS investigations and clamp on to a scandal that, if covered correctly, can actually have an impact at the elections of 2014 and 2016. The story is being picked up by the international press because, unlike Benghazi, this is something capable of attracting many people’s attention.

We have no access to the information available to the military, so we cannot possibly know what happened. The danger of the Bergdahl debacle is that it falls neatly into the vision of the President as somebody who decides to improve a situation he doesn’t understand, rushes in half-cocked, and messes everything up completely. There have been five years to figure out what to do about Bergdahl, yet his rescue looks unprepared, uncoordinated, and pushed through without any consideration of the consequences. This is the same pattern we have seen just the other week with the President’s plan to “rescue” higher ed. The higher ed has been there for a long time, it has suffered from serious structural problems for at least two decades, this is not something that just emerged. There has been time to address these problems in a measured and step-by-step manner.

We all know that there is great demand for stories that would make Obama look incompetent and flailing. But he’s doing all he can to make sure these stories are easy to concoct. There was not a great supporter of Obama than me both times when he was elected (mostly because of the “But just look at the other guy, brrrrr” approach) but I can’t deny that I’ve started avoiding American news because I don’t want to see yet another story that would make me even more disappointed.

P.S. I have started doing the same thing concerning Obama that I have been doing for years regarding the Canadian government of Stephen Harper. Whenever a fresh story about either Obama or the Harperites gets reported, I start mumbling under my breath, “The economy, the economy, at least they managed to improve the economy. (Or prevent it from getting to the point where it would need improvement, as in Harper’s case.”)

So let’s discuss. Do you feel less or more enthusiastic about Obama than you were back in 2008? Did he live up to your expectations? What was the biggest disappointment (if any)?