President Me (18 page)

Or there's the bitchy postmenopausal friend of your mom with the huge wooden bracelets. It looks like she's wearing the plank from a tall ship around her wrist.

And what about showering? Do you spend an hour taking them off beforehand or do you have to cover your arms with a garbage bag so they don't get moldy and give you a staph infection? At least with the Livestrong bracelet you just keep it on for a few days at the office until everyone knows you're better than them. But really, who are you trying to appeal to? Do you expect Ted with the corner office to think, “I was never attracted to her before because of her huge ass and sunken chest, but now that I see the eighteen bracelets dangling on her wrist I've got to make her my wife”?

BRACELET DUDE:
Worse is the guy with bracelets. We are in full-tilt bracelet mode these days. I was sitting around on Sunday watching
Catfish
, as I'm apt to do. Both dudes on that show wear bracelets. Eighty-six percent of males under forty have bracelets now. Married men, single men, doesn't matter. If you're married, what are you even doing? Who is this bracelet for? Are you trying to attract your wife? She's obligated by law to blow you. It's on the books, look it up.

What about the assholes who wear bracelets? This isn't getting you any closer to vagina. This is a turnoff, trust me. I've talked to women. I don't know why I need to be saying this. Chicks need to man up and get the word out.

This has even invaded my own home. My son came home the other day and he was wearing a bracelet. We were doing our usual wrestling around and the bracelet fell off. So I started teasing him, “Oh, Natalia must have lost her bracelet because a little boy wouldn't wear one.” And then I saw that he was wearing a necklace too. So I said, “I'm going to come over there and snatch that necklace your girlfriend bought you.” And he paused, looked at me very seriously, and said, “My
boyfriend
got me this necklace.”

GUY WHO LOOKS AT DING ON THE SIDE OF MY CAR AND ASKS, “WHAT HAPPENED HERE?”:
A fucking meteor. What do you think? Someone opened their door into me or I did something stupid. Either way, fuck off. This is the same guy who wants to know how you got a zit, like you're going to say, “Well, I do this thing where I tape a canned ham to my face before I go to bed.” To all of you assholes who do this, there are only two stories—the “I'm an idiot” version or the “the guy in the Costco parking lot is an idiot” version. But the real idiot is you for asking in the first place.

FERRET-ON-SHOULDER GUY:
This is another asshole who needs you to see him. So he wears a ferret around like a scarf. You see a lot of these guys on Venice Beach, shirtless, with the ferret or a snake. Every now and again they'll double down on the creepitude and put on the Rollerblades. Because what you need is a large rodent or an anaconda coming at you at 35 mph atop a leathery shirtless dude.

GAY GUY WHO SUNBATHES NAKED ON APARTMENT LAWN:
He's claimed the eight-by-eight-foot patch of sod in the front of his apartment building as his personal tanning booth. He's the forty-four-year-old set decorator who's waiting for his parents to kick off so he can own his first home. If he were really interested in a tan, he'd go to the roof, but then how would everyone driving by get to see his balls? God forbid this asshole get into his Prius and drive to the fucking beach. Hey dickhead, next time you are at the Rite Aid picking up your lube, why don't you grab a bottle of Mystic Tan and call it a day.

HOLIDAY JOGGER:
This is the cockhole who decides he can't live one day like a normal person drinking and eating with friends and family. Doesn't matter if it's a holiday, he's got to get his jog on. The worst offender is the Thanksgiving jogger. Doesn't matter that rest of us real Americans are about to vomit up turkey with all the fixin's so we can make room for meringue, this guy has to get joggy with it.

I saw one on the Fourth of July. It was balls-hot out and I had a belly full of ribs and Sam Adams and this douchebag came sprinting by, shaming me.

I spotted the Halloween jogger too. She was bobbing and weaving through packs of kids dressed as Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers while she was dressed as a bitch with body dysmorphic disorder. It's fucking Halloween. Put down the sneakers and pick up a Snickers like a normal person.

A quick tangential Halloween-related mandate . . .

In my neighborhood, the minivan will pull up and all the kids from the crappy neighborhood will cascade out. They cut in front of my kids, bogart all the Reese's, pile back into the minivan, and head back to their hood. It may sound cruel but I now mandate that you are forced to trick-or-treat in your own piece-of-shit neighborhood so you can see just how bad it is. There'd be a neighborhood council meeting at 8
A
.
M
. the day after every Halloween to talk about fixing your combat zone. I bet your neighborhood would get a lot better real quick after a night of watching your kid step over a dog's corpse to be greeted by a toothless pedophile handing out candy corn from 1969.

But while I'm still down for a drone strike on the moving targets that are these joggers, I have a better solution that can make some money for my administration. My government will produce and sell a line of holiday jogging apparel that looks like street clothes—sweatpants that look like jeans and running shoes that look loafers. That way, as you jog by on a holiday, you're not shaming us. The only caveat is that at the time of purchase you must agree that every two hundred feet you'll shout out your dog's name. As you're chugging along you have to call out “Scrappy!!! Come here, Scrappy!!!” That way, if I'm holding my sixth beer in one hand and a pulled pork sandwich in the other and I see you jogging by, instead of thinking about my impending coronary, I'm thinking, “Look at that poor son of a bitch. He lost his dog. Wait till those Fourth of July fireworks start. The dog's gonna freak out and he'll never see it again.” The outfit will even come with a severed leash. This would work, right? It's genius. Or rather JEAN-ius.

I love predator drones. I'd like to decorate them like we did with the P-51s in WWII. We should put pictures of pinups on them just to further piss off the radical fundamentalist Islamic zealots who are being lit up in their SUV convoys. I also like the irony that the deity they pray to five times a day does nothing, but our unmanned eye in the sky is raining fire down on them. It's like a vengeful God that's assembled in Palmdale, California.

Beyond my list of targets, I don't have a ton of notes for the Department of Homeland Security.

Keep on keeping on. That department just needs a good manager to gather all the information, analyze it, delegate tasks, and be prepared for some long days and unexpected shit-hitting-fan action. That's why, as my Secretary of Homeland Security, I nominate Patriots coach Bill Belichick. He's clearly a good manager, can think on his feet, and has experience secretly taping and analyzing his enemy's patterns.

I could have gone with any NFL coach, by the way. Think about how much better football coaches are at their job than politicians. They study. There's a lot of sleeping in the office after watching hours of game film. Unlike the president, once the season starts you won't find these guys anywhere near a golf course. They're exquisitely driven and have to be the best because they're competing with the best. If a coach goes four-and-twelve, he's out. Then you have politicians who get up there and say, “At the end of the day there are a lot of hardworking people who are looking for jobs.” Meanwhile the only jobs they're creating are for themselves. They're just campaigning all the time. Coaches keep their jobs by being good at them, not by spending all their time telling everyone they're
going to be
good at them. Coaches get reelected because they get results, not because they promise results. I don't care how many playoff or Super Bowl appearances you've made, you're always a back-to-back six-and-ten season from being shit-canned.

Ultimately I'm not that worried about terrorism. I think we can handle it.

I want to explain something to all the wannabe terrorists reading this. We don't hail from a piece-of-shit nation like you do, where if you blow up one outhouse the whole country ain't right for the next five years. You think we think like you think. But we don't. We're too big and too powerful. You cannot fuck us up. We're better than you, we have backup plans. Take down the towers and we're up and running the next week. It's not like our credit cards didn't work on 9/12.

We don't pray to Allah five times a day, we go to fucking work. We have brains and we have books. We don't commit honor killings or throw acid on girls for learning to read. We have a civil society and thus an infrastructure that can handle your shit.

So try taking out the new Freedom Tower at Ground Zero. We'll build another one. And in the meantime we'll be fueling up the predator drones.

VOTER ID LAWS

I'm
constantly accused of being a racist. One of the reasons is because I am. Also I'm completely for so-called voter suppression. I don't think asking someone to produce a valid ID at the polls is a hate crime. I understand that yes, there are going to be more minorities who can't produce ID, and yes, the people pushing this rule are always Republicans trying to keep people who aren't voting for them away, but these motives aside, it's still a good idea. I'm not into “big government” but I do think, post-9/11, anyone should be able to produce a government-issued photo ID when requested. This is compulsory. This is the bare minimum. Whether you're driving a Maserati or a tractor, if you get pulled over you need to show it to the cop. What can you do without an ID nowadays? Not much. You can't get a credit card, you can't get through airport security, and you can't check a book out of the fucking library. Why should you be able to vote?

And who's the racist here? No one said
all black people
need to have ID. It's not a racial issue. The people making it a racial issue are the ones who are saying or, more accurately, thinking but not having the balls to say about those who don't have ID, “They're not up to the challenge of securing an ID. They're not capable of completing the simple task the rest of us accomplished as teenagers.” Good job, asswipes. Way to help them feel helpless. Why not demand something from people and have them rise to the occasion? I don't think standing in line at the DMV for an hour and getting your picture taken is too tall an order. Whether you're black, white, Hispanic, or Asian, I think that if you can't get it together to obtain photo ID, we don't need your vote. Your ID doesn't matter, it's your IQ I'm worried about.

I'll take it a step further. As president, I'm directing the Federal Election Commission to require not only ID at the polls, but also a recent pay stub. If you're on welfare, you're not contributing to the economy. So why should you get to vote? You're just going to vote to get more free shit anyway.