Dear Disenfranchised and Frightened Peoples of America:
Spring and a new world are here, and despite all the doom and gloom on your ever-crackling AM radios, everything's going to be fine. It's been a long winter – extra long, for you, because it probably started sometime in early October.
That's when it became apparent that Sarah Palin, the sassy Great Northern Savior you embraced overnight as Good People after over a year of not-really-knowing-who-Barack-Obama-is,TM wasn't going to be able to rescue your political party from being ousted after all.
When reality spoke on November 4, many of you headed for your basements and spent the dark cold months playing records on your record players whenever talk radio was taking a station break. Your record players played songs of The Apocalypse like "He's a Muslim," "He's Gonna Take Away Our Guns," and "He's a Muslim, Really."
When you weren't jamming to odes to the End of Days you were forwarding chainmail to each other.
And that's pretty much what you did all winter.
Some of you poked your heads up the basement stairwell periodically in February and March to shriek, "The Messiah has tanked the stock market" or simply "We're all Doomed."
The room you've been living in – the room that looked to the rest of the world like just another small, dark personal dungeon – must instead have been as comfortable and enveloping as the soft, dark inside of your very own fleshy posterior abyss, for everyone not inside there seemed to remember that the stock market had tanked last October and that it was already the End of the World back then.
I'm writing you today to invite you out into the great big world with the rest of us. There are some great sales going on in this brave new world, and you're going to want to take advantage. Cheap houses and cars. Low interest rates. Land's End is having more blowout internet sales than an Oriental rug store. We need you to come out and spend, spend, spend with the rest of us, because both the past and current administrations have made it clear that this country is heading straight down the rabbit hole for-real if we're not all perpetually in debt.
Just so we're all on the same page, here's what's been going on while you wintered in hell.
... Obama took away all your guns and ammunition. Well, only kind of. You guys scared yourselves so badly passing around chainmail rumors about Obama taking all your guns and ammo away that you guys took your own guns and ammo away from yourselves by making runs on gun stores. Most of the ammo shelves are now bare, and what's left is going for three times the pre-panic market rate. Way to go.
... The whole New Messiah Thing: Your invention, your nightmare. Wake up whenever it's convenient and you'll find that wide-eyed zombies have chanted mindlessly for presidential candidates since the beginning of time. The "Obama ... Obama" chanting crowds were real here too, but were a small segment of the folks who elected the Big O. to the Oval Office. See, your Grand Old Party, bereft of any clue as to how to beat the O. Express late last year, ran the chanting "Obama" ads to make it look like only mindless people were behind the whole Obama Thing. Talk radio happily forwarded the message, since you guys live and die by the United Front, even if it's a United Front to Disaster. To pull this stunt off, the whole cabal counted on a large percentage of you folks to be mindless. And for large numbers of you folks ... dang ... they pulled it off.
... President O. has lots of people torqued-off on both sides of the aisle. And that's as it should be. Do you really think we'd get anywhere if those foaming-mouthed liberals got their way on everything? (Hint: We've already seen what happens when foaming-mouthed conservatives get their way on everything). Everybody says this all the time, so I'm going to say it too: The United States of America is great in-part because it was founded on a system of checks and balances. If, on balance, President O. gets it wrong, he's out of office next time around. He knows that, and so does his base. We like it that way, and we hope America likes it that way for a long time to come. No more keeping a president in office just because he shares our opinion on when life begins or who sticks what where ... let's hope.
... President O. isn't perfect. He screws up a lot. Head-hunts people with nanny and tax problems. Shakes hands with saluting Marines. Makes dumb jokes about the handicapped. Fox News is reporting that President Obama gave Queen Elizabeth a Wet Willy (I made that one up, but I like the line anyway ... going with it). In short, O. has lots in common with your beloved once-upon-a-time Decider-in-Chief, except for that being-dumb-and-aggressive-at-the-same-time-and-rarely-if-ever-admitting-when-you-are-wrong issue, not to mention the pandering-to-the-base-at-all-costs issue. Sometimes just good character trumps being perfect, and though history has not been all the way writ on O., so far, so good.
... Your new president-whether-you-like-it-it-or-not is keepin' it fresh. He could sit and sulk about the economic meltdown on his plate just like GWB sat and sulked over the Middle East for most of his presidency. But O's keepin' it real ... getting out to the talk show circuit, YouTubing, BarackBerrying, and generally executing the wide range of presidential tasks in traditional and non-traditional ways without showing us a sweat. At this point we probably still shouldn't worry about where this fellow gets his cool. The Secret Service, I have it on good authority I just made up, monitors Renegade for extraterrestrial radio signal manipulation 24/7. And of course, he could always just snap.
... The stock market has buds on it. Not blooming yet, but the fundamentals are in place. Many of the banks that cried out for funding late last year took a long look at the conditionals on TARP money and decided they weren't so destitute after all. Hope you were buying bank stocks in-between all those Look What the Obama Administration is Doing Now chainmails and talk radio "We're now a socialist country" moans.
... You can average 45 mpg in your car without buying a weenie hybrid. Diesels are back, and most of them don't clatter and spew black smoke. They have torque out the wazoo. You can save some bucks on transportation costs and fill up at cowboy-hat-wearin' truck stops (hey ... remember cowboy hats?). You can also get a federal tax credit for buying a diesel, so you can stick it to da man too. (Since everybody likes to stick it to da man when their man ain't in office) .
... GM is still selling a 638 horsepower Corvette. Get one while you can.
That's what I know so far. All ribbing aside about you folks brainwashing each other into submission, seriously ... really ... think about getting that Corvette. (Obama's going to take those away, you know).
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I'm not done yet. Next week: Your Unhumble Car Czar's Giant Pre-web Road Test Database.
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