Barack Obama embarrassed as his “Beast” limo gets stuck in Ireland

Barack Obama embarrassed as his “Beast” limo gets stuck in Ireland. Barack Obama’s “Beast” limo has received a lot of attention since it debuted in January 2009 as the president’s set of wheels. It has gotten attention because of its extremely thick, five-inch armor and the fact that the Secret Service actually refers to it as “The Beast.” However, in an embarrassing moment yesterday in Ireland, “The Beast” looked like a little pussycat as it could not even make its way over a ramp as Obama was exiting the US embassy in Dublin. The fact that his limo got stuck is also a metaphor of sorts, as it readily draws a parallel to the fact that the US as a whole has been stuck with a miserable economy that never gets better, ever since the president came into office.
There are conflicting reports as to whether or not Obama was actually inside “The Beast” as it got stuck on the ramp. The Independent, a paper out of Ireland and the one you would expect to provide the most reliable information on this embarrassment, reports that the president and Michelle Obama were indeed inside “The Beast” when it was stopped cold by the ramp. However, a report in Car Advice, which quotes Secret Service spokesman Robert Novy, claims that Obama and his wife were not in the impeded limo. That sounds like damage control by a Secret Service that should be very much embarrassed for not even being able to handle a ramp!
According to reports, the president and first lady had to get out of the limo and get into a second one to take them to their destination, which was to a waiting helicopter that was to whisk them away to Obama’s ancestral home in the afternoon. If you were in the crowd outside the US embassy in Dublin yesterday, you would not have seen Obama having to embarrassingly exit his “Beast” limo like he was in a slapstick comedy and enter a backup vehicle. The Secret Service actually drove a big van in front of the stuck limo so that they could get it moving again (read: do damage control and desperately try to save face at the same time) without the crowd seeing anything.