Is there anyone in the public eye less grateful than Michelle Obama?  Good grief.

She makes it sound like the worst thing in the world to endure was being First Lady.  Wait, no.  Being married.  No, wait.  Having children.  Wait, no.  Being a woman.  Heck, she’s even bitter about her hair.

She’s pretty bitter about all of it, actually.  Not least her time as first lady.

“What happened that eight years that we were in the White House? We got out alive… But what happened to me?”

Remember when she referred to the White House as a "really nice prison"? Here she describes it a bit.

“…It’s expensive to live in the White House.  Many people don’t know, but much is not covered.  You’re paying for every bit of food you eat.  You’re not paying for housing and staff in it, but everything, even travel.  If you’re not traveling with the president, if your kids are coming on Bright Star, the First Lady’s plane — we had to pay for their travel to be on the plane.”

Imagine!  She had to pay the equivalent of coach airfare for Sasha and Malia to travel with her (on her taxpayer-funded personal plane) and -- can you believe it -- her own groceries?  On her husband’s $400,000 per year salary?  Horrors!

Stipulating that living in the White House is not simply a life of luxury but of service, one can have some sympathy for the fishbowl aspect of it, but my heavens ... When you are given the opportunity to to represent your country and serve as she did, a sense of humble gratitude seems in order, not ... this.  This clearly comes from a place of contempt, or at the very least, non-love for one's country.  If she were proud of America, as we know she has difficulty being, these remarks would be unthinkable.

Still, it must not have been too expensive to live in The White House, since their net worth multiplied by a factor of ten while they were there:

"Upon entering office, the Obama's had an estimated net worth of $1.3 million. By the time Barack handed over the keys to Trump, his fortune had reportedly skyrocketed to more than $12 million.”

Maybe she clipped a lot of coupons.

She doesn’t even seem particularly grateful for her own two healthy children, describing the lives that (ostensibly) emerged from her as “the least important” thing her organs have ever done.  It’s hard to imagine what else they could have done that’s more important — to any normal mother, at least.

It’s also hard to imagine how this Harvard and Princeton grad has been so misinformed:  She also says in the same segment that men don’t understand women’s reproductive lives because female biology has ‘barely been studied’ which is, of course, absurd.  She goes on to say men have “unearned confidence” that women don’t have.  They also, evidently, have unearned sperm and this, too, upsets her.

Her low opinion of men who have a never-ending supply of sperm and high opinions of themselves extends most mercilessly to her husband and she’s not particularly bashful about sharing it.  She says, without a speck of concern or hesitation, that she’s very glad she never had a son because he’d be exactly like Barack Obama. Ouch.  Just ... Ouch.  What a truly horrible thing to say about your husband, even if he weren’t a public figure.

Then there’s this:  “Do you know who I am?” she (effectively) said once — to her own children!  “People line up for my advice,” she told her daughters, who didn’t seem all that impressed with some advice she’d given them, so she whipped out a version of the “don’t you know who I am” line.  Because, according to Michelle Obama, Michelle Obama has “earned” respect.  She most definitely has a very high opinion of herself, even if her own daughters, at least in the moment, may not have.

“It's my life now, and I can say that now,” she says, of her decision to not attend the Trump inauguration, despite the fact that former first lady Hillary Clinton, showed up, as did former first lady Laura Bush.  Not to mention first lady Jill Biden, who would no doubt argue had the most to be bitter about on that cold January day.

Had Michelle Obama had the tiniest bit of gratitude in her heart for the honor of being able to serve as first lady for two terms, she’d have gone.  

That part of her life is not over.  It will never be over.  She’s part of history now.  Not to mention that she’s profiting handsomely from it.  Her eight years as first lady affords her the lavish lifestyle she now lives.  It’s her role as an historical figure, America’s first black first lady, that affords her every penny she now has; the multiple homes, the celebrity infused travel and events, all of it.

If she can’t be grateful for the honor of being a two-term first lady, for her place in history, for her two healthy children, for her long marriage, she could at least be grateful for the cash.

Image: Screen shot from GMA video on X