As I will be turning thirty-five the summer of 2008, I am hereby officially announcing my intention to run for President of the United States. I don't have a hope of winning, a single qualification, or any desire to be President, but it might be fun to run. I don't really have any platform. agenda, or policy, either. This, of course, makes me just like every other politician, so perhaps I need to set myself apart. It seems that taking strong stands on non-controversial non-issues is the order of the day: I am firmly against child abuse, indiscriminant killing, pillaging, and mopery.

I also have a strong stance on family values. I'm against them. I have no specific problem with my family, or with yours. It's the whole notion of families being valuable that I find an affront to the American Way of Life. Or my way of life.

I'm not talking about the family values that keep a steady stream of sweet, sweet profanity from pervading daytime public television (but why can't Elmo drop an F-Bomb once in a while?), though to me much of it does amount to censorship. I'm talking about the family values you see at the grocery store, the discounts these so-called "families" get because they can buy items sold in quantities that would rot in my refrigerator before I could hope to finish. (A thousand chicken wings for a dollar, half price buckets of cheese, whole heads of lettuce.) I'm talking about the emphasis on the family that means I have to get out of the car and run around the other side to use the drive by mailbox, when families can do it with ease. Where's my tax break? Just who do these families think they are?

Perhaps I'm not even joking. When courts are telling people that the primary purpose of marriage is to raise children, to raise children in a world which is already scarified from overpopulation, perhaps the problem is too much of a focus on the family. (I considered some clever little play on the word focus and the scope of a sniper rifle here, but I think jokes about assassinating children might not be appropriate for a Presidential candidate, but would be conspicuously absent in a political bit with a bow to Jonathan Swift. As a politician, though, I'll have to watch what I say. I have big shoes to fill. (I thought about adding "with cement" here, but jokes about deep sixing our current president, however subtle, are also probably a bad idea. (If you are an FBI, or a member of any "family," see any dictionary under irony, verbal). Vote for me! Wait, no, don't. I just remembered I'd be a horrible President. I don't like killing people. I hereby withdraw my candidacy.

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