A suggested opening statement for Obama’s next debate:
"Americans, I am sorry.
I did not realize you were seriously considering voting for Mr. I-Stand-By-Whatever-I-Said. I thought Mr. Etch-A-Sketch was a teaser for some new Showtime comedy. Forgive me.
Just seems to me that a guy who spends his days railing against China but spends his nights counting profits from the companies he’s shipped over there can’t be serious. A guy who writes and passes a health care reform that then goes national, but later decides that health care reform is socialist—I mean, he’s just joking, right? A guy who says he’ll cut $716 billion from Medicare and then yells at the other guy for supposedly cutting $716 billion from Medicare? A guy who asks for a special waiver of Welfare rules and then screams that waiving Welfare rules is anti-American? In the afternoon, Etch was like, I’m gonna cut $5 trillion; that night he was all, I’m not cutting taxes!
I was positive that Etch was not a real candidate. I was sure Kristen Wiig was writing that stuff. Etch is like, 47 percent of the country is mooching and lazy—and then he doesn’t even pay taxes? That’s hilarious!
When he started doing that stuff about “we built it,” I thought maybe he was gonna be like that lizard that sells auto insurance—you know? Maybe it as a promo for a hardware chain? I mean, you don’t take a sentence from someone and then rearrange the words and build your whole campaign around that. There’s video and stuff, you know?
Etch can’t be real. You can’t say you’ll be more pro-gay than Teddy Kennedy one day and then more pro-Bible than Michele Bachmann the next. That you’re pro-life, but also pro-choice. I thought he was doing some kind of satire on our political discourse. I was wrong.
The foreign policy stuff really fooled me. Do real candidates go abroad and insult foreign leaders to their faces? Do they call press conferences to condemn actions that didn’t happen—you know, that weird shit he said about Libya—and then just scream the shit louder after they get the right info? Who calls a press conference to announce all the things you’re gonna do, and then just lists all the things the president is already doing? Seriously—I was like, check, check, check.
Wait a second. What about the Big Bird stuff? OK, you’re still pulling my leg. I’m gonna solve the deficit by cutting PBS? That’s like saying you want to build the Taj Mahal with five popsicle sticks. And Big Bird—he’s more popular than Jesus, right? No real candidate comes on TV and says they are gonna fire Big Bird to fix the economy.
Yeah—you are still kidding. Let me know when the real candidate shows up. I’ll be happy to debate. Meanwhile, whoever’s writing Etch—is it Setch MacFarlane?—whoever you are, you slay me.
In the meantime, can we get back to work? We’re bringing unemployment down. Getting health care to the whole country after, what, fifty years? Making the country energy independent and getting serious about climate change. Oh, plus I gotta keep Turkey from invading Syria and Iran and Israel from nuking each other. So—this is all hilarious, but I’ve got shit to do. Thanks."
