Dear Mr. Sarcasm,
So you’re running for President again, eh? Needless to say, we have some questions for you.
— Political in Poughkeepsie
Dear Political:
Bring it on. I will grant you seven questions, with follow-ups where appropriate.
1. You’ve done this whole “I’m running for President” joke before. Are you actually so starved for material that you’d do it again?
If the old “I’m running for President” gag is good enough for the likes of Ralph Nader to repeat endlessly, then it’s certainly good enough for the likes of me.
2. The Constitution requires that the President be, among other things, 35 years old. How do you respond to critics who claim (correctly, we might add) that you’ll only be 34 as of Inauguration Day 2009?
Simple American ingenuity. Being seventeen never stopped me when I’d go to Houlihan’s for after-work drinks back in the early 90s, and this was before the internet and affordable high-end color printers. This country’s fake ID market is second only to Israel’s on the global stage. I’m going to do what any good American should do and purchase a well-constructed, well-designed American-made product. And if that means dying my hair or making up a story about how the DMV camera was out of focus that day… well, remember that word I just used. Ingenuity.
Failing that, I have other ideas — ideas that will hopefully slip past the press until after I’m inaugurated. Then I can get to work pushing through the number one item on my legislative agenda: The Comprehensive Identity Theft Amnesty Act.
3. What makes you a better candidate than the other choices available (and those that are not yet available, seeing as the first primaries are still a year away)?
For starters, you won’t see any of this false humility from me that my opponents seem to love slathering themselves in. I won’t be calling Barack Obama “a credit to his race” like Senator Biden did last week, nor will you be hearing me say things like “Hillary Clinton is pretty good… for a girl.”
I’ll say this as clearly as I can: I’m a better candidate than everyone else because I’m a better person than everyone else. Too much time is wasted on the campaign trail trying to convince people of this without really saying it. I think I just saved myself 18 grueling months of careful wordsmithing and double-talk just now. Isn’t that a refreshing and welcome change from “politics as usual”?
Yes. The answer is yes.
4. You claim to affiliate yourself with the “Silly party,” which doesn’t appear to be a registered political party at all, but a reference to an old episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Since we can’t simply consult one of the two established party platforms to find out what you stand for, can you please expand on those stances now?
I don’t know, can I?
4a. Would you, please?
I would, and I will. The Silly Party stands for the simple ideal that the funnier reality is preferable to the factual reality. We choose to believe things because they make us laugh, not because they’re necessarily true.
I’ll give you an example: is Tom Cruise gay? Quite possibly not. But the notion that one of Hollywood’s leading sex symbols, who has been connected to many a hot piece of starlet over the years, is actually a homosexual is kind of ironic, and therefore preferable for its humor potential.
Does Iraq have weapons of mass destruction? Who knows? Who cares? As President, you’d never hear a lie like that out of me, because it’s simply not amusing. You might hear me claim they’re stockpiling Boston cream pies and bottles of seltzer for some kind of vaudevillian sneak attack on Kuwait, though. Or possibly something funnier. I’ll have advisors to help me there.
Everything’s been so somber since 9-11. There’s violence, economic strife and plain old fear around every corner. These things are not going away, and every President since Lincoln has known it. The legacy of the twentieth century is the government that distracts you from the horrors of daily life with meaningless trivia. The Silly Party simply means to take this idea to its logical conclusion — while we’re waving our hand this way, we’re pulling a coin out of your ear. And the whole time, you’re being brutally sodomized by a gang of Chilean drug lords. But the whole time you’ll just be thinking “ooh, a shiny quarter! I wonder when that state quarter project is going to be finished, anyway.”
4b. Does Chile even have drug lords?
Who knows? Who cares? I made an on-the-spot call there, that “Chilean” was funnier than “Columbian.” And I stand by that. That’s just the sort of integrity you should come to expect from an AAlgar administration.
5. You were a somewhat visible political presence on the internet during your 1996 and 2000 campaigns, using your Sarcastic Voyage column as a sort of virtual soapbox. You seem to have all but dropped off the map for the 2004 election, and now you’re “back.” Where’d you go, and what can you say to convince any potential supporters that you won’t just disappear again?
Okay, first of all, never use the words “virtual soapbox” together like that again. That would have been a lame turn of phrase in 1996, back when we were still calling this thing the “information superhighway.”
(Side note: Did you know the internet is not a big truck, but a series of tubes? I only just discovered this myself.)
More to the point, I will say only this: Ross Perot has been known to drop off the scene and pop up again later. And I wouldn’t say it’s ever hurt his relevancy, would you?
6. Let’s try a hypothetical situation here: say you’re in the position Al Gore was in, in the 2000 election. The count is too close to call. America’s electoral credibility stands in the balance. What would you do differently?
I really hate sentences where you have to repeat a word, like “in in.” I know it’s grammatically correct, but it still bugs me.
Man, Gore was such a sore loser. (Or “winner” if you believe the radical left-wing agenda of Michael Moore and the independent commission that irrefutably concluded that Gore won the election.) He wasted weeks of the nation’s time complaining about that whole thing. Weeks! I mean, it’s a good thing he finally gave up when he did, right at the last minute. We only had another month to inaugurate the new President! Nobody can count a few thousand votes in a month! That’s just unreasonable!
Personally, I wouldn’t have handled it that way. You know who a great model of dignified concession was? Richard M. Nixon. He could have whined and cried and stamped his feet about the 1960 election, but he didn’t. He handled it with the grace and professionalism that he was known for. And it’s not like it made him bitter or hostile or anything!
All this country’s leaders and would-be leaders could take a page from the book of Nixon.
7. Would you say you approve or disapprove of the direction this country has taken over the last eight years?
Has Hillary made the “stop and ask directions” joke yet? That’d be a good sound bite. For a girl.
In closing, I’d just like to say that if more people actually cared about our electoral process and got off their lazy asses to vote, it’s possible the country wouldn’t be in the fucking mess it’s in now. I place the blame squarely at your feet, you gaggle of slack-jawed yokels.
Vote AAlgar!
