WASHINGTON — Faces were red with embarrassment in the Oval Office yesterday when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Alyssa Mastromonaco discovered that the Obama administration had been using the Bush Policy Playbook rather than their own since the President took office in 2008.
“I found a big stack of papers in the back of a utilities closet labeled Bush ’04 Foreign Policy Positions,” explained Mastromonaco. “When I looked through them, I was stunned to see that they were identical to what we’ve been doing the past four years, down to the typos. It turns out that we’ve been using their old playbook all along! Talk about awkward.”
Further investigation revealed that a clerical error by President Obama’s initial Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel accidentally caused the title page of then-Senator Obama’s foreign policy positions to be attached to an old copy of outgoing President George W. Bush’s policies.
“Boy do I have egg on my face,” said the President. “The unending drone war, the inability to close Guantanamo, the severity with which we’ve prosecuted whistle-blowers. It’s just been page after page from the Bush foreign policy playbook. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more embarrassed. Nobody tell Michelle.”
Asked if this discovery will lead to a new era in Obama Foreign Policy, Vice President Job Biden was guardedly hopeful. “I’d like to think so. It sure would be nice if we maybe started acting like educated, intellectual Democrats who understand the subtle nature of America’s foreign policy efforts,” he said. “On the other hand, we got reelected. So why mess with a good thing?”
