UPDATE: NBA.com reports that Obama was a guest of team owner Abe Pollin. Whoops.

It’s one thing to chastise companies trying to do business while taking bailout money from the federal government; it’s quite another to drop oneself in primeau courtside seats for a Washington Wizards game on Friday night and offer absolutely no explanation as to how one obtained them.

Friday night, [Obama] sat courtside at Verizon Center and watched the Washington Wizards trounce his hometown Bulls. One afternoon last month, Obama and his wife, Michelle, visited second-graders at a local public school because, Obama explained, “we were just tired of being in the White House.” The first lady chimed in: “We got out! They let us out!” [Seattle News]

It’s certainly possible that Obama could have paid for his seats out of his own pocket. But in a time where he’s demanding that such perks be yanked from corporate budgets, why not go out of his way to disclose that he didn’t use taxpayer money to get them? Why would he set himself up to look like a hypocrite? And nobody seems to have picked up on this; everyone’s shocked and proud that a black president would take himself to a basketball game. And I love how everyone is jumping in and yelling, “Well Bush never went to a game when he was president!” Bush probably never drank beer, either! It’s like he wasn’t even a real person!