Perhaps he needs a thesaurus…

With the Bush tax cuts set to expire, one can only imagine the comfort the average taxpayer in this country felt when the President stated, in his first post election interview with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes, that his “number one priority coming into this is making sure that the middle class families don’t see their tax rates go up January 1.”

Clearly, with such little time remaining for such legislation to take place, the idea of the President making it his number one priority to ensure that rates will not go up should go a long way towards allaying the fears of those who have seen rising food and fuel costs over the last year with little prospects of new jobs or increasing wages in the near future. What decisive actions, what intense meetings, what impassioned pleas must be planned in the next few days that would allow the President to work towards achieving his number one goal? How many long hours would he be working in the Oval Office to be sure that his priorities are realized? Well, as it turns out, the answer to each of these questions is “none.”

That’s right. Apparently, in order to achieve his “number one priority” in the very short time available to him this year, President Obama felt that an extended trip to Asia was in order.

Yes, that is correct. It would seem that his “number one priority” could only be accomplished by a 10 day travel itinerary including such stops as Mumbai, New Delhi, Jakarta, Seoul, and Japan. Apparently we should all take heart in understanding that visits to the Great Buddha statue, the Gandhi Museum, the Taj Majal Palace, the Tower Hotel, Jumayun’s Tomb, the Mahatma Gandhi memorial, and the National Handicrafts and Handloom Museum (this one for Michelle but apparently important as well) are an integral part of his overall strategy.

Sure, to the layperson this may seem as if the extension of the tax cuts are not his “number one priority;” but, rather that his “number one priority” was simply the use taxpayer money to remove himself from the political scene for a bit after his party suffered such a crushing defeat in the November elections, however, I am sure that the President could certainly explain how this is not the case if we gave him the chance. Who knows, it may even be his number one priority.