WASHINGTON, D.C. — Using his Nobel Peace Prize to hold the door to the Oval Office open, President Obama this week held an impromptu press conference in the world’s most famous semi-round room to discuss his decision to leave roughly 5,500 troops in Afghanistan when he leaves office next year. The decision comes as a near-complete reversal of his stated plans to leave a much smaller number of people — around the size of a regular embassy — in the country that has been the theater for America’s longest-running war. During the press conference Obama admitted that the change of opinion would “seem inconsistent” with someone who ran and won two election campaigns on being a voice for the moderation and de-escalation of America’s military role in the world, but said that ultimately his “Senioritis” made him say to himself, “fuck it, I’m almost out of here, let the next president handle it.”
“It’s not that I wanted to kick the can on this Afghan War thing,” Obama told reporters, “but I won’t lie. I have a major case of Senioritis at this point, and wars are like, really hard. So I figured, fuck it, I’m almost out of here, let the next president handle it.” Reporters asked Obama if he felt he was letting the people who voted for him because he promised to end the wars of choice America was fighting when he was elected by making this decision, to which Obama replied with a shrug and a barely audible, “I dunno” as he shuffled his feet.
Obama said that he had been trying to figure out what to do with the troops in Afghanistan his “entire Senior year” in office, but that as the clock starting ticking down his days as president, he started to lose interest in the job, and started day dreaming about what he was going to do on his first summer vacation as a free man. “So I went to a bookshelf in this same Ovala Office where we are holding this press conference today,” Obama said, “and I started looking through past president’s papers.” That’s when President Obama said he found an essay written by his predecessor, George W. Bush, entitled, “Why Come We Need to Stay At War in Afghanistan Forever.”
“I was amazed at how easy it was to read, being written in crayon like it was,” Obama said, “and while it makes no sense to stay at war in a country that is clearly in need of a huge, multinational effort to truly rebuild it, and not just in a half-assed, haphazard way, again, I’m so almost out of here bitches, so…” Obama trailed off and put up his hands in half-shrugging gesture. Obama said he plans on re-typing the paper so he can “put it in [his] own words” and he will hand it in to Congress well before the deadline and he receives his post-presidency diploma and certification.
President Obama says he is also considering other can-kicking decisions, but that the inactivity of Congress and its unwillingness to do anything anyway makes it hard for him to find his own ways to be ineffectual and incompetent. “At the end of the day, when you have a congress that literally does nothing, anything I manage to not do will look less by comparison,” Obama said, adding, “but war is a pretty big deal. So me putting my hands up and giving up still means something in that arena, and i’m just so glad to be doing something meaningful. Even if it is just making sure we stay at war permanently, because you know, I’m progressive.”
Reached for comment, former Vice-President Dick Cheney told reporters, “It’s about time that pussy did something right, but I knew something big was going to happen. I got a war boner the other night, and I only get those when my bank account is about to get much, much bigger.”
The Afghanistan War started October 1st, 2001, has been the longest running active military campaign in the history of the United States, and has a cost estimated in the trillions of dollars.
