Dear Mr. Obama-President:
Hi. How are you? I am fine. You probably don’t know me, but I’m able to write things on the Internet, so I’m kind of a big deal. Who are we kidding; you know me. Everyone knows me, because I’m always right.
Well, it’s been a whole year, and everything isn’t fixed yet. So much for you as the purveyor of hope and change and progress. I mean, all you had to do was get us out of a Vietnam-esque quagmire in Iraq, search a few thousand caves in Afghanistan for a man who’s probably in Pakistan, and fix the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. You haven’t fixed a single one of those problems! And it’s not like you had to waste time creating them or anything; they were already in place and ready to be fixed when you got there! How much more slack do you want, Obama? Maybe we should get your dear sweet grandma to come in and be your secretary of state? In the State of the Union, you had the audacity to ask the Republicans for bipartisan support, and not simply say no to everything! What the hell do you think this is, a reasonable country full of reasonable people who can be swayed by reasonable arguments? Fuck that shit; the Republican party makes a decision, and all the Republicans stick to it, there’s no room for independent thought or analysis in government!
I think you’re coasting on the “first black president” title instead of actually trying to do things. Any reasonable president would have had all those problems fixed in a couple weeks; they wouldn’t take an entire year to try and work out a conclusion, they would just tell everyone what’s going to happen, and then it would happen. That’s what democracy is all about; the president makes all the decisions, and then the legislature and judiciary back him up. Trying to get everyone to actually agree, or be somewhat contented with the final decision, is what’s taking us so long to get out of these multiple national and international crises of historical scale. Instead, you’re engaging in debates to try and reach a compromise, and in the meantime, the terrorists are winning.
In the spirit of fixing the country, here are some ideas to try and expedite the process:
Anyway, it seems you’re having a few problems with the country. Your approval ratings are falling, and I think I know why: you’re not actually doing anything. Sure, you’ve tried to get a healthcare bill through Congress, but none of the Republicans liked it. And none of them liked the subsequent drafts. Apparently none of the changes they requested which were subsequently made without question made them happy either. So I’d advise ditching it, and moving on with your life; there are far more pressing issues you have to deal with. I’m going to provide a brief outline of the solutions here for your benefit, though you’ll obviously have to fill in the details.
- Fixing Iraq. This sounds complicated, but it’s really very simple; you have two basic options here:
- Find a charismatic leader who already has significant popular support among the most enthusiastic constituents, and endorse him for president. His stance on issues won’t really matter, since he’s basically a puppet for the more important forces working behind the scenes that we can’t let the people know about, because they’re too stupid to know what’s good for them. But it’s okay, we know. Anyway, your endorsement should get him elected; if it doesn’t, tell him to run again next election and profess your undying hatred for him. If the first election didn’t work, the second will. Now, since we want to make this as quick as possible, we don’t really have time to go through the legislative process with every law, so make some “cosmetic changes” to the constitution which give ever-increasing power to the new president. Since he’s a charismatic guy, he’ll be able to sell the new laws as being in their best interest, and it’s true! They don’t need to be bothered by the intricacies of government anyway. Once your new president has enough power to move quickly, increase the size of the army drastically to put down any insurrection; crime is common in Iraq right now, and the extra jobs will encourage potential jihadists to join up instead! You could even have a slogan like ‘It’s the army, or it’s killing yourself!’ Now that the country has some stability thanks to its new leadership and peacekeeping force, it’s time to gradually withdraw the hand of American influence, lest we be seen as having some sort of power over what happens; other countries really don’t like that, and we want them to like us. The new government might fall over a few times without the guiding hand of the US to steady the bike, but eventually they’ll be up and riding all around the local neighborhood, shooting water pistols at the other kids!
- Just leave, without doing any of the stuff detailed above. Sure, there’ll probably be some instability, but Iraq’s vast reserves of black gold will ensure that lots of trustworthy investors come a-callin’, and if 2007 taught us anything, it’s that a lot of people with money who want to help out only have your best interests at heart; they will stabilize the country and rapidly grow the economy, providing jobs that lure kids away from terrorism. Once those kids’ entire self-worth is tied up in their job working for a foreigner to extract oil from their backyard, they’ll have no reason to continue causing trouble for as long as they’re employed removing a finite resource whose value is wholly dependent on nigh-unpredictable international forces.
- Finding bin Laden. I’ve got only one solution here, but that’s plenty, because it’ll definitely work. It’s inexpensive, it doesn’t require massive troop deployments, and it uses technology that’s readily available. Just X-ray the entire country of Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s hiding in one of those caves down there, and the big problem is that we can’t see inside them. Well, X-rays can do that for you! Just launch a satellite that can take X-rays from space, and image everything. Eventually, you’ll find a group of individuals living in the caves; in fact, you’ll probably find several, and one of those is bound to be bin Laden and his cohorts. Bring him back to the US to make a big show of putting him on “trial” (yeah, like he could ever be found innocent), which will put you in the spotlight and make your approval ratings skyrocket! Then, we get all our troops out of Afghanistan and we never have to worry about that country again.
- Stabilizing the economy. Right now, the national economic health is “pretty not good”. So the question is, what made it better in the past? The answer is relatively simple, and we only have to look at the country a few years ago. Back in 2007, everyone was making a ton of money trading stocks with each other, and buying real estate. But then the housing bubble burst, and we ended up in the current recession. So the solution is twofold: first, find the next bubble (personally, I think it’s in video game skills), encourage investment in it, and build it out of some sort of unbreakable flexible polymer, so it can’t burst. Second, quit and endorse a Republican, because Republicans are better at fixing the economy. It’s pretty simple if you look at it; the market tanked in 2008 as it became more and more apparent that a Democrat, who might actually impose regulation and limit the activities of the organizations whose well-being directly affects our economic stability, could get elected. So Bush preemptively bailout out the banks to counteract this force, leading to the current Bush Recovery; the market may be up since you took office*, but this is only because Bush was such a genius.
So those are my ideas. I think they’ll work very well, and pretty soon everything will be great.
Sincerely,
quincy0191
PS: Please pass on my name to your Republican successor in case he has any questions (though I know he won’t; Republicans fix problems much better than Democrats) and so he knows where to send my Congressional Medal of Honor.
*I searched through four pages of “stock market since obama took office” to get that time-appropriate piece (and personally, I'm not all that happy with the quality), which points out that the market is up significantly since he was inaugurated. The rest of the articles are about how the stock market hates him, or how it’s down (but those are after only a month in office; I guess it was already time to judge his entire presidency), which I found so wonderfully ironic that I felt I should share it. Apparently even when he’s right, he’s wrong.