Frustrated Obama sends nation rambling 75,000-word e-mail

From The Onion on Nov. 26:

WASHINGTON—Having admittedly "reached the end of [his] rope," President Barack Obama sent a rambling 75,000-word e-mail to the entire nation Wednesday, revealing deep frustrations with America's political culture, his presidency, U.S. citizens, and himself.

The e-mail, which was titled "A couple things," addressed countless topics in a dense, stream-of-consciousness rant that often went on for hundreds of words without any punctuation or paragraph breaks. Throughout, the president expressed his aggravation on subjects as disparate as the war in Afghanistan, the sluggish economic recovery, his live-in mother-in-law, China's undervalued currency, Boston's Logan Airport, and tort reform.

According to its timestamp, the e-mail was sent at 4:26 a.m.

"Hey Everyone," read the first line of the president's note, which at 27 megabytes proved too large for millions of Americans' in-boxes. "I'm writing to you because I need to clear up some important issues. First and foremost, I want to say that this has nothing to do with the midterm elections because I was going to send an e-mail regardless of the outcome. However, I guess one could argue that, in the end, the midterms are an important measure of a president's overall success, though I wouldn't go so far as to call the results a referendum. Legislatively, I feel I've had a lot of success that I think history will judge quite favorably. I mean, pretty much every modern president has seen his party lose seats during a midterm, you know?

"Anyway," the e-mail continued.

A 150-page printout confirms that while Obama's points are generally cogent in the first quarter of the message, the increasingly chaotic spacing, multiple spelling errors, and near total lack of commas rendered the later portions almost impossible to parse.

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