Alternate Reality

Here is a side-splittingly funny bit of alternate reality from the website Sadly, No!:

Dick vs. the Asteroid

Over at America’s Shittiest Website™, Peter “The Mustache of Enhanced Interrogation” Kirsanow tells us all how super cool Dick Cheney’s torture defense was yesterday:

Cheney: Adult [Peter Kirsanow]

A serious, important speech.

Politicians and the media seem unduly impressed by favorability polls, often drawing unwarranted conclusions from them. Since Cheney has relatively high unfavorables, it’s assumed that the public dismisses his statements.

It would be interesting to see the results of a more finely calibrated poll, one that compares how well-respected, competent, and effective the subject is perceived to be relative to similarly situated individuals. As a friend succinctly puts it, “When that big asteroid finally heads toward Earth, who’s the person you’d most want to be in charge?” I suspect Cheney would score at or near the top.

Interesting story!

Here at Sadly, No! Research Laboratories, we recently detonated a hydrogen bomb near a massive pocket of electromagnetic energy, thus creating a parallel timeline where Dick Cheney actually did win the 2008 presidential election and where he did deal with an asteroid assault during the first year of his presidency! Read on, if you dare, to see how this counterfactual history played itself out…

On October 15, 2009, a small asteroid crashed into a rural area of Wyoming, killing 2,000 people in a small town and leaving a massive crater 60 miles wide in the ground. President Richard Cheney, who was just awakening from a nap in his underground White House lair, was informed of the crash by Chief of Staff Alberto Gonzales, who the day before had handed him a memo from NASA with the headline “Asteroid hurtling toward the United States.”

“That damned space rock has just assaulted my home state!” Cheney snarled. “Nobody could have predicted this would happen!”

Cheney called a press conference later in the day and urged Americans to show strength and resolve in the face of this unprecedented assault on the Heartland.

“Asteroids are evil rocks,” said the president. “We do not negotiate with evil rocks; we defeat them.”

The story of President Cheney’s rise to power is a strange one. Despite having an approval rating of -345% as vice president at the start of 2008, Cheney threw his hat into the ring during the Republican primary after every Republican simultaneously dropped out of the race.

“I thought I had a good shot at becoming president until I remembered that I shared the same party as George W. Bush,” explaned ex-candidate Mitt Romney. “We could run an Abe Lincoln-Ronald Regan ticket this year and still lose.”

On the Democratic side, John Edwards beat out Hillary Clinton in a spirited primary in which Edwards used populist rhetoric to capitalize on the furor created by the Federal Reserve’s massive bank bailout program that launched in the wake of the Bear Sterns collapse in March. Promising Illinois Senator Barack Obama had initially considered running for president in late 2007, but in the end decided not to run because his prospects for success were too small.

“I’m a half-black dude with the middle name ‘Hussein,’” Obama explained. “I can already imagine all the emails that are gonna go around about my birth certificate and my secret Muslim faith. Win this election? No I can’t!”

Heading into the summer conventions, Edwards chose Delaware Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate, while Cheney covered his center flank by nominating pro-choice Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Spector, whom Cheney convinced to join the ticket after promising to let him use the CIA and the FBI to investigate the New England Patriots’ illicit videotaping program.

“My Iggles… won that game… fair’nsquare…” bellowed an enraged Spector during his RNC convention speech. “Bill Belicheat… will soon feel the wrath… of the fed’ral gubmint!”

While initial post-convention polls showed Edwards taking a comfortable 485-point lead over Cheney, the race was thrown into turmoil after Weekly World News photographer Mickey Kaus snapped pictures of Edwards engaging in illicit sexual activities with a Sasquatch and the Bat Boy. The Democratic ticket was further hurt during the vice-presidential debates, when the gaffe-prone Joe Biden said that Cheney “deserved a great deal of praise for the compassion and love he’s shown toward his bulldyke daughter.”

On November 4, 2008, 346 Americans went to the polls and voted for Dick Cheney, giving him a decisive 50-vote victory over John Edwards.

One year later, Americans were mourning the deaths of their fellow countrymen in the Wyoming asteroid crash. An enraged Cheney was determined to never let another asteroid crash into the United States again and had decided to use any means necessary in order to achieve that end. Cheney reasoned that it was not enough to merely respond to asteroids after they crashed. For America to be truly secure, the government needed to attack asteroids long before they reached orbit. To this end, he decided that the United States needed to set an example to other asteroids in the galaxy by launching a preemptive strike on the large asteroid that was menacingly hovering over the Earth: namely, the moon.

In order to build his case for war against the moon, Cheney worked to strong-arm NASA into proclaiming that the moon could come unhinged from its orbit to the Earth at any moment and that the military needed to destroy the sinister heavenly body in order to safeguard the homeland. When NASA officials balked at his request, Cheney hired George C. Deutsch, a disgraced former NASA press aide, to go through the agency and make lists of all scientists who displayed signs of disloyalty. Once the list had been completed, the scientists were then rendered to Cheney’s underground White House lair for interrogation. The following transcript was taken from a video of an interrogation session under the White House on March 16, 2010:

[An unknown NASA scientist is tied down to a waterboard in President Cheney's underground lair. Cheney and NASA Grand Inquisitor George C. Deutsch enter the chamber to start the interrogation.]

DEUTSCH: My liege! I have brought forth the Unbeliever to receive your judgment!

CHENEY: Fine work, my young apprentice. And what are his crimes?

DEUTSCH: My liege! He refused to sign a loyalty oath proclaiming that our solar system has been scientifically proven to have been created by an Intelligent Designer!

CHENEY: Bah! The heretic will rue the day he defied my will! Tell me, heretic, do you not regret your lack of faith?

[Cheney pours water over the scientist's head, causing him to gasp and writhe in pain.]

SCIENTIST: GLAAAAAAAAARBB!!! ACK! Please, yes! I repent! Just stop it with the water!

CHENEY: You are wise to confess, heretic! You may achieve penance for your actions by doing one simple task: signing your name to this official policy document that proclaims the moon to be a mortal danger to the security of the United States that must be eliminated!

SCIENTIST: Buh, buh, but sir? You’re talking about destroying the moon? Thu, thu, that would be extremely unwise because…

[Cheney pours more water on the scientist.]

SCIENTIST: GLARRRRRRB!!! OK, OK, I’ll sign it! I’ll sign it, I’ll sign it!

CHENEY: That’s good. Now here’s the pen. Let’s…

[A knock at the door interrupts Cheney. Deutsch opens the door and a hunched-over Alberto Gonzales shuffles in carry a basket of dead rabbits.]

GONZALES: Master, I have brought you your daily basket of fresh uncooked bunny rabbits to devour!

CHENEY: That is excellent, Alberto! Bring them to me!

[Cheney examines the basket and his grin quickly turns into a snarl.]

CHENEY: Alberto, these rabbits are already dead! How can I enjoy my meal if I do not first participate in the slaughter?

GONZALES: But muh-muh-Master! Your doctor told me that you shouldn’t slaughter live bunnies just days after you suffered your twenty-seventh heart attack!

CHENEY: BAH! INSOLENCE!!!

[Cheney pulls out his rifle and shoots Gonzales in the face with birdshot. Gonzales, yelling in pain, flees to seek medical attention.]

CHENEY: Deutsch! You are now my chief of staff! Go forth and fetch me my rabbits! And make sure they survive until they get here!

DEUTSCH: Yes, my liege

[Deutsch exits. Cheney returns to get the scientist's signature.]

CHENEY: I can’t wait to eat those bunnies!

[End transcript.]

After obtaining all the necessary intelligence from NASA officials, Cheney went on the Sunday morning talk shows and began to build his case for war. In addition to the signed statements of top NASA officials attesting to the moon’s nefarious intentions, Cheney produced an alleged picture of terrorist mastermind Mohammed Atta walking on the moon just days before the asteroid struck Wyoming. Cheney called this the smoking gun that proved that the moon posed a threat too grave to ignore.

Although McClatchy later reported that the supposed picture of Atta that Cheney showed on Meet the Press was actually a photograph of Neil Armstrong, the media in general did not question the premises of the president’s claims. The British tabloids in particular ran wild with the claim that the moon could crash into Earth a mere 45 minutes after being knocked out of its orbit. On May 21, 2010, Cheney went on national television and said that he was giving the moon 48 hours to surrender before he would launch a nuclear strike to destroy it. Senate Democrats, alarmed that the president would declare war on the moon without their consultation, tried to draft a nonbinding resolution telling the president that they might be displeased if he were to launch his preemptive lunar assault. The measure was scuttled, however, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that they wouldn’t have the 95 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster.

Two days after his ultimatum to the moon was met with eerie silence, Cheney ordered to sinister rock destroyed.

The year is now 2012. It’s been two years since Dick Cheney blew up the moon, which caused thousands of smaller space rocks to crash all over the earth, killing hundreds of thousands of people; amazingly, none of these space rocks crashed into the United States. Additionally, the moon’s absence has caused the Earth to wobble more on its axis, thus producing more extreme periods of hot and cold than we have ever known. President Cheney, after suffering his seventy-eighth heart attack, has announced that he will not seek a second term as president. In his farewell address to the nation, Cheney says that the decision to destroy the moon was the correct one because America had not been struck by an asteroid in the two years since.

“In the fight against asteroids, there is no middle ground,” Cheney tells his fellow Americans. “Destroying only half the moon would have left us half exposed.”