My Criteria for Obama's VP Choice

This is something I wrote for the Obama VP Listserve.

I've given money to this guy so many times I think I finally earned the right to be completely sarcastic / ironic (it's hard to tell which sometimes) with the people who were filling up my mailbox with idiotic "I will not vote for Obama if he does not nominate Hillary as his VP" short sighted delusional rants. My original response, when I discovered one ranter was from Florida was:

"I think Florida has more than shown the world that it is not deserving of the right to vote, as a state. They screwed up 2000, and screwed up in the 2008 primaries. Put Hillary on the ticket over lost votes in Florida? My ass, man. Putting Hillary on the ticket would be the one thing that would guarantee we'd lose this election. There are more people who hate her in this country than like her, full stop. And for good reason, too. Putting her on the ticket for the sake of a state that votes with less credibility than most third world countries is laughable to me. Obama would be better served by considering Florida for a mass land sale to Cuba after the election."

That prompted my inbox filling up with something like 51 responses by the end of my work day. So when I got home, I wrote the rather inspired bit you see below...
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Okay... I mulled this over in my head all day at work and came up with a list of coherent criteria I am going to use as a litmus test in deciding whether or not I will tolerate Obama's VP choice enough to vote for Obama. In keeping with the Hillary spoilers, I also plan to not vote for Obama unless I am personally satisfied that his VP choice meets all of my requirements. I think this would be a god list for us all to work from. In no particular order...

1. DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE - Years ago, I was in favor of gay marriage. When I first came out as a gay man in college, I felt that the relegation of homosexuals to second-class status by refusing us marriage rights was a total sham. I have since changed my mind, however. After spending more money on the weddings of heterosexual friends in the last two years than I've spent on myself in a decade, after having my work schedule inconvenienced time and again due to heterosexual marriages and honeymoons in my department, and after considering all of that against the fact that more than half of all marriages in this country end in divorce, I no longer think that gay people should have the right to get married. In fact, I think nobody should have the right. It is clearly a flawed institution that is destined to fail one out of every two times, and given that heterosexuals currently rule this country, I think it is clear that heterosexuals have proven how utterly stupid marriage really is. I think this benefit or "right" should be abolished in all cases, and all marriages in the country should be nullified. If Obama does not pick a VP candidate in keeping with this clearly logical defense of marriage - (as we've shown in our defense of Democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq and at home, the only real way to defend something is to destroy all hope of it) - I will not only not vote for Obama, I will write in Hillary Clinton as my candidate of choice. God knows, if she's not all for banning heterosexual marriage, she's pretty thick.

2. SOCIAL SECURITY V. NASA - Social Security is broken, and all of us under 40 know that it won't be there for us when we are old and wetting our pants. NASA, meanwhile, wants to go back to Mars. A solid half of the budget for NASA is based on the concept of re-entry vehicles and return trips. This is not needed. With a simple draft, requiring only moderate revamping of our bureaucracy, we could enlist the elderly in this country to serve as Astronauts to explore the heavens for us in search of a new planet to live on. We don't have a lot of time left on this planet before it all goes tits-up, and I, for one, would like to kickstart a new mission to find more habitable planets. If we use the elderly for these missions, there will be no need for "return trips" and half of NASA's budget could then be slashed and transfered to Social Security, which would also require a lot less money, given that there aren't many SSA offices on Mars.

3. Obama's VP pick should, under no circumstances, be a Republican. And despite the fact that Bill Clinton was the best Republican President of the last 30 years, his wife should not automatically be considered. Wait... she's a Democrat? Are you serious? Okay. Obama's VP should be a party un-affiliated Siamese cat. That makes more sense. A marriage defending/destroying, anti-NASA Siamese cat. But definitely not a Republican. I mean, it's not like a Democratic Congress just recently gave Bush authorization to do to Iran what he did to Iraq, is it?

4. FLAG PINS - Obama should never have to wear one again. This should be one of the duties of the VP. I think, actually, it was part of Al Gore's job for 8 years, wearing the flag pin. But Obama's VP should take it a step further and ram the flag pin right into his or her forehead. And it should constantly be picked at, so that the wound is constantly bleeding. This way Obama will not have to mess up his own forehead, and the constant bleeding will serve as a permanent distraction reminding everyone that Obama's VP is very, very, very patriotic. Any VP unwilling to repeatedly stab at their forehead with a tack every day for 4 years should not be considered.

5. 18 million Floridians should be the only ones allowed to vote on who Obama picks as his VP. However, their VP election, due to a scheduling error, should not take place until early January of 2009, resulting in a confusing constitutional crisis and a bunch of pissed-off voters who, naturally, should not take it upon themselves to correct the DNC's mistake before the election. Also, the VP should know a lot about String Theory and modern cosmology as well as have easy access to a power source greater than our sun. They'll need to have some kind of ability to warp space-time if we're going to make it through a general election without Florida f*cking it up somehow.

6. MAJOR ISSUE AND CENTER OF PLATFORM: Gay marriage, the NEA and school vouchers. (Obviously, the answers are: Re-Branding, Protecting and "not on your life, even when people in inner cities say they want to try them, even when poor & minority activists say they want them, and even when our schools are, by all standards, completely failing, it is not even worth trying, seriously, so suck it up, VP candidate.") Yes, some would argue that there are two other big issues that are screwing us all, every last one of us, straight, gay, white, black, Democrat, Republican, sane, insane alike, working, looking for work... like the war, and the energy crisis... But really, those things will pass. Plus, they're, like, urgent 'n stuff. And require bipartisan attention, like, urgently 'n stuff. Or we'll, like, have a Depression. But seriously, they'll pass if we stick to inactive talking points about abortion and social security for the 5th straight election in my lifetime. That other business is hard, and a harder sell. What really matters are abortion and gay marriage and social security and slashing the Federal Government, and we all know this. I mean, if we tweak the platform now, just once, just to solve a couple of very real crises, then the whole world will implode, cats will become dogs, peace will break out in the Middle East, nothing will make sense, chaos will rule the world and the Rolling Stones will start getting younger. That would be stupid and not at all in keeping with how Democrats run elections. Remember, people. We're Democrats. If tradition holds, we are, after all, currently debating the most ironic, without being didactic, way to lose in November. Right?

7. ABOLISH ALL LIBRARIES: They are havens of porn and sodomy. This was effectively proven by J. Edgar Hoover, who worked undercover for some time to gather all the evidence, according to a great biography of Hoover by Richard Hack. (Yes, that's really his name. It's called Puppetmaster, and you'll cringe when he explains the title.) Also, libraries register people to vote. We cannot run an effective Democratic campaign if lots of people vote. Things get totally out of hand that way, and that's how party establishment survivalists lose their grip on power. And then we're totally screwed, 'cause we'd have to start reading books instead of writing blogs. Christ, can you imagine the horror of that? No, it is absolutely essential that we suppress the vote in this election, and not pretend it is just the Republicans who do it. We've had help from the media in this time and again, and we love it. That's how we wound up running John "I was for the war before I was against it" Kerry against George "Uh, yeah, I was for it all along, Johnny Flipflopper" Bush in an election where the prosecution of the Iraq invasion was the central issue. Seriously, you people are smart enough to know this! Our candidate was picked by the media, who thought a war vet would be a good story (a story on his judgment? Feh.), and a party leadership that didn't want its people getting too uppity. Today, we are on a precipice, having accidentally let actual, like, normal folk pick the candidate. The media tried to tell us we really wanted Hillary for a full year before Obama entered the race, remember? Yeah, they're pretending to like him now, but we all know they're just acting like it was their idea all along because they know we don't remember that a year ago, every last talking head on TV from Sean Hannity to Wolf Blitzer to that raving drunk guy who spittles on MSNBC and the Lefty O'Reilly that comes on after him, from Falwell to Russert, they all told us from the night of the 2006 mid-term victories, if not earlier, hell, from the moment she ran for the Senate, that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee in 2008, and we were all stupid, sexist, ignorant hicks if we didn't get that it was her turn to lose an election for us. WTF happened? This is scary shit, and if it doesn't scare you, it should, unless you relish the idea of your own face exploding from the inside out, which may well be what happens when for one rare moment when the fabric of the universe reverses itself and we elect an administration that might actually fix one or two things. It is absolutely essential that as many votes as possible be suppressed this time around. This means shutting down all libraries. We must nip it in the bud, both the voter registration part and the bit about books. That's the deal-breaker. No books, more blogs. And I swear to Christ, even Hillary would be with me on this.

8. THE VP SHOULD BE PUBLICLY DRUNK AT ALL TIMES. Another dealbreaker. I want a hard, hard drinker for VP. Some of the best moments of the Bush administration came during times when I am absolutely convinced he was thoroughly trashed. I'm knee deep in a bottle of Southern Comfort myself right now, and I still make more sense than the leader of the free world. Either I'm a genius or our president is a slobbering boozer, and either way, that's pretty awesome. Dealbreaker. I briefly considered Barney Frank for VP before I realized he'd prefer that the VP be stoned all the time, and he's not with me on banning marriage. Seriously, its the only way to save it. But back to my original point, the VP candidate needs to pledge, from the start, to not open his mouth in public until he is right on the verge of not just making a mockery of his native language, but of saying something so absurd that it almost sounds like an autistic haiku. So I'm thinking Obama's vetting team should start looking at English professors on most of our college campuses. Especially those specializing in postmodern lit who did a lot of boozing with friends in the History department. And a drunk person in an executive position creates just the kind of character people will love to read about for decades to come. I mean, look at the stuff that's still coming out from the Nixon tapes. Nixon made his funniest racist rants when totally sloshed! Jim Angleton? The most effective and powerful and longest-serving-by-decades head of counter-intelligence CIA ever had. And his lunch consisted of five martinis. But boy could he talk some crazy. We need a VP willing to step up to the plate and fill the void Obama created when he secured the nomination and stuck us with a presidential candidate who knows how to pronounce words like "nuclear" and appears surprisingly sober most of the time. We need someone to provide us with gems like "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." That absolutely requires a drunk VP. In fact, we should legalize cocaine, while we're at it.

9. VICE PRESIDENT MUST BE EXPERT MARKSMAN - Nothing is more embarrassing than your VP shooting someone in the face. No, check that. The guy your VP shot apologizing to the VP for the stress his getting shot in the face by the VP caused the VP... that's the kind of stuff we want to avoid. Our VP needs to shoot to kill. None of this "leave half his face" nonsense so he can come back and cower before the cameras about how you half blew his face off, but missed because you were drunk. No, when Obama's VP takes aim, that needs to be the end of the story. In fact, if the Secret Service do their job right, there's no reason we even need to know about it. If that guy hadn't lived, chances are we wouldn't even know what a terrible shot our current Vice President is. This can be solved easily enough if we ensure provision number 8 is always observed (meaning, the VP is drunk publicly but sober privately, and especially while hunting) and that the VP hunts with an automatic assault weapon.

10. JUST NOMINATE MCCAIN FOR OBAMA'S VP - Okay, screw it. Let's just nominate McCain for Obama's VP. For one thing, it'd probably confuse the holy hell out of him. I'd put solid money on him accepting the nomination and running against himself with Obama. I mean, after 2000 & 2004, the bar for electoral surrealism is set pretty high. We've got to do something creative to get out of this rut, or we're gonna have a pretty boring election this time around. Like, we're in danger of having one with a clear winner and everything if we don't get on top of this, for Christ's sake. McCain, for his part, would no doubt see it as a guaranteed way to at least be Assistant President before his face completely falls off. McCain supporters would no doubt vote for the McCain-<Space Left Empty> ticket as opposed to the Obama-McCain ticket, but the Hillary supporters who support McCain would be utterly confused and I guarantee you, half of them would wind up voting for Obama by mistake. (This alone would help us carry the state of Florida.)

And on a special note: RIP Hunter S. Thompson. You would have loved this f*cking election. You gave up too soon.

- NC