At first glance, the fact that President Obama needed twelve stitches after being elbowed during a pickup game didn’t look good for his already threatened masculinity. After all, Obama got clobbered by a guy whose college nickname was “Nice Guy Rey” during a pickup game where, we imagine, the unspoken rule was: Don’t make Barry look bad. But Obama’s staff is trying to re-spin the incident in their boss’s favor. “A White House official with knowledge of the incident, and eager to make the president look as tough as possible, said that [Reynaldo] Decerega required a hospital visit after the collision and received some stitches himself,” reports the Washington Post. That’s right. It’s not that Decerega’s elbow smashed up the president’s lip, it’s that Decerega’s pathetic bony joint was no match for the president’s manly, elbow-crushing lip. But the badass attitude doesn’t stop with physical prowess. It also extends to trash-talking. A witness told the Post that “after scoring at Camp David, the president has expressed satisfaction with his own game by teasingly pointing at the presidential seal at half court and exclaiming, ‘Whose court is this?’” Eh, Obama might want to be careful about drawing attention to a presidential seal. They haven’t always been on his side.
