I have decided to run in the upcoming Presidential elections as dictator. I am aware of the stress this will cause me, the long hours, the sacrifice, but I sense that the country yearns for me in its desperation, its despair for a Leader. In this week alone I have gotten hundreds of emails urging me to take the reins of government (OK, three emails, but I am rounding up.) At whatever cost, I will answer my country’s call.
Some will object to my certain ascension as voters reach out in their anguish. Naysayers will say “nay,” that being how you know they are naysayers. Skeptics will say, “But Fred, you have no qualifications as dictator.” To them I reply, “True, but look at what we’ve got.” This is an insuperable argument.
A considerate dictator informs his dictadees of his plans for them and the country. Herewith a few of the measures I foresee:
On day one I will pardon Assange, replacing him with Anthony Blinken, who will remain in the cell as long as Assange has. Turn about is fair play, my mother told me.
I will remove all restrictions from Cuba and give it most-favored-nation status. If those wretched pseudo-Cubans in Miami protest, I will have them arrested and left on a desert island somewhere. Preferably one with an active volcano. Cuba is no danger to anyone anywhere, Keeping eleven million perfectly good people in misery, people who make great music and good rum, to please a pack of irritating frauds is political sadism. If you have a desert island, let me know.
I will cancel the B-21 intercontinental nuclear bomber. The only use for an intercontinental nuclear bomber is to have an intercontinental nuclear war. I don’t see the advantage in it. Further, for the price of one of the damn things we could buy Germany. Then we’d have really good beer.
I will remove all sanctions on Venezuela. If we want their oil, we can jolly well buy it. America isn’t, or should stop being, in international retarded school-yard bully shaking down the kids for their lunch money. This brilliant move, combined with getting out of Cuba, would give America good relations with Latin America for the first time in history.
I will arrest all politicians who appear on television in front of the American flag. I have nothing against the flag. I just don’t think it should be used as an advertising gimmick by useless pols seeking support for their next felony.
Under my Affordable Sidewalks Act, I will order the widening of sidewalks everywhere so that all Americans will have a place to live. Here in Mexico people live in houses but I suppose sidewalks have more fresh air. In New York I will install raised platforms in the subways so that Americans can sleep out of reach of the rats. Stalls will sell ammunition if there is any left over after the Ukraine gets all it wants. This is the least government can do for the citizenry.
Looting being serious during natural disasters, I will remedy this by four words, “Looters will be shot.” It is a known fact that shot looters substantially reduce their looting. I may also start twelve-step programs for survivors. Since our cities now amount to natural disasters, the same formula will apply to urban looters, such as smash-and-grab artists.
In hopes of saving some small portion of national treasure for the benefit of Americans, I will have the management of arms firms wrapped in duct tape and dropped down abandoned oil wells. If this doesn’t work, I may take extreme measures. In the meantime I will ask Kiev for a loan of a hundred billion dollars, pledging California as collateral. American infrastructure increasingly looks like something out of the 1840s. With a hundred billion, I could bring the US to the level of China in 1990..
I will designate the American rail systemin its entirety as a national museum, which would require only the placing of signs. This would prevent embarrassment in the eyes of foreigners who might think us actually at such a level.
I will require that all assault rifles be manufactured with irremovable geo-lockslinked to GPS so that they can be fired only within the United States. This would keep the NRA happy, allow Americans to shoot each other as is their Constitutional right, but keep America from arming Mexico’s drug cartels. When American soldiers invaded other countries they would have to use spears, which might reduce enthusiasm for meddling where they have no business, though this is a long shot.
I will give that sweat-shirted comedian who runs the Ukraine fifteen minutes to start negotiations or I will coat him in bacon rind and feed him to army ants. Which I will probably do anyway after the negotiations. He has killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly his own but some Russians, while running around the world and having dinner with important people. I will task the Smithsonian with finding the requisite ants and refrain from feeding them for a few days before their application.
I will have John Bolton placed for a year and released then, if I remember, in the bottom of a public latrine in a bus station in Uganda. I will do this because it will be deeply satisfying but, to enshroud myself in an aura of rationality and purpose, I will offer it as a measure to prevent war with China–to which end it would in fact militate.
I will have all F-35 fighter planes, the ones that don’t have any parts that work, installed in shopping malls, filled with potting soil, and used as planters. The plants will probably die due to poor drainage or something, but you can’t have everything.
I will put a bounty on congressmen, with no bag limit. I may supply patriots with rental duck guns to further this meritorious measure. No citizen should be deprived of the pleasure of shooting his Congressman simply for lack of suitable armament. With a good catapult, they might make serviceable skeet. The scoundrels do nothing for the country and make too much noise.
I will bring Nancy Pelosi out of retirement and send her to consort with John Bolton. I think solitary confinement is a violation of human rights
I will require that teachers be able to read. This may be thought excessive and unusual, but it is worth a try. For the greater good of the country,I will have teachers colleges filled with linoleum cement with the future miscreants inside. This will raise the national IQ by at least three points.
I will outlaw computer-driven trading in the stock markets, thus preventing parasites from skimming fortunes they have done nothing to earn. Should they object, I will urge them to reflect that in summer the air conditioning at Leavenworth is said to be inadequate.
I now await a vast up welling of support at the polling stations.
I guess this is OK for a start, Fred, but you forgot some important policy moves:
I fully expect you, once in office, to send the entire US military to Antarctica to bring democracy to its freedom-starved citizens. Since the country’s strategic oil reserves have become depleted, I suggest you only provide enough fuel for a one-way trip.
I also fully expect that the corporate tax be replaced with an advertising tax. In other words, companies pay taxes based on how much they spend on advertising. I suggest that for every dollar a company spends on advertising it must pay a billion dollars in tax. Just imagine going for a drive and not seeing another billboard. Ever again. This should also apply to non-profits.
I strongly suggest that all healthcare professionals in the country be forced to wear cloth masks twenty-four hours a day. This should be enforced with staples or nine-inch nails. The masks can only be removed once said professionals have graduated from re-education camps where the scientific method is taught in all its rigor.
Finally, Fred, I want you to burn down every university and college in the country. The entire post-secondary education system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. 50% of current faculty should be fired, 49% arrested for fraud, and the remaining 1% of quality educators can be retained to work in the new system, which I also expect you create.
Thanks. Now get out there and rock the vote!
Finally, some ideas I can get behind!
Actually, for the first 2 years of the pandemic, all doctors and nurses really were masked on the job. I know because I have family and friends who are doctors.
Shut up, AI.
To quote America’s anthem by the great G. Carlin – “America, America, man sheds his waste on thee. And hides the pines with billboard signs from sea to oily sea”!! I can easily envisage Pelosi and Bolton esconsed in a bus station latrine in Nigeria. It might – just might – inspire some genuine introspection. We can but hope.
Correction – A bus station in Uganda, not Nigeria.
Fred, you’d have had my vote long ago!
Your proposed punishment for John Bolton is inhumane. You won’t get my vote unless the bus station latrine cell is solitary confinement.
Sorry, Fred, You have taught me well. Voting is for suckers as ALL politicians are liars.
Honestly, .. I would rather take on the job of cleaning the Uganda bus-terminal latrines, than leading this country.
Fred, it’s a great start. Count me as being in favor.
For few moments there, as I read your policy doc Fred, I knew feelings of being amused and happy at the same time. These days, that is rare.
can I just suggest, that when you achieve this most longed for status and repair damage done to Venezuela for their oil, you also repair all damage done to other nations on the continents for the CIA and it’s filthy footprint. The CIA wants lots of money from drugs, and the drug lines/lords are wreaking havoc. Ecuador is now up to it’s third political assassination in weeks, and thousands of citizens have died at the hands of said drug gangs making a fortune by servicing the CIA.
Oh, also, please refer to the Andean Continent as the Andean Continent and the nations there on as the Community of Andean Nations as we do who live here. America is no longer lord of Empires to go around naming everywhere to suit its own ego.
Pena ajena….
Seems to me that simply removing all sidewalks in major cities would go a long way toward eliminating the blight of bums, vagrants and dope fiends.
[…] Fred Throws Sombrero into Ring, Trump and Biden in Despair, Earth Wobbles in Orbit […]
It would be nice if President Fred, or Presifred or Potusfred, could include a human centipede kinda solution for Killary and other sociopathic mysogonists in power positions. The same could be applied to all the CNN, NBC and FOX generals with “lots of experience in Afghanistan” who predict Russias destruction within the next 10 minutes or so. The CORAL-Act (Closed Oral-Rectal or Anal Loop Act) could additionally stabilise the information processing and media sphere. President Fred should definitely apply it also to most journalists who work for big papers and the TV. I mean they are used to processing excrements in their mouths anyway, it wouldn’t make that big of a difference.
Huzzah!!
[…] Guest Post by Fred Reed […]
Fred; You forgot to make Israel the 51st state, making it eligible for federal welfare which would just be a formality as it already gets far more than the other contiguous states and the seat of the national government, which would just be a formality as it already is.
If you’re going to give Cuba most-favored-nation status perhaps you could also send 10million illegal aliens, errrm undocumented workers, currently in the US (well over 100,000 of them right here in New York City) down to Havana. And why shouldn’t the USA recolonize Cuba with their southern hemispheric compatriots?? They’ll be more comfortable in a Spanish speaking culture, where the food and music is more similar to where they originally came from. I never saw any of them at CBGB’s.
When the Verrazano Bridge was put up, many of the local Brooklyn Mafia moved to Staten Island to set up shop … “it was wide open territory, you know what I mean”..
Sending the recent arrivals down to Cuba would give them vastly greater opportunities to succeed and flourish, compared to The Rotten Big Apple. Cuba is wide open territory, filled with a complacent populace, and a small group of overlords. It’s an opportunity for the CIA to finally rid the world of those pesky Castros, oligarchs who’ve been mainaining Cuba as a Luddite’s paradise for sixty years. Ten Million immigrants have a way of overwhelming the local population and local power centers.
Fred, I love the idea of PotusFred! I’ve been following you for over a decade and have enjoyed your opinions and commentary. It is fiendishly appropriate.
You seem to have overlooked a few very important policy corrections.
All DEI departments in schools, churches, corporations, government offices and everywhere else should be closed and their entire staff detained and sent to Cuba to build homes for all the illegal aliens we’ll be sending there.
If you do burn down every university and college in the country then you won’t have to shut down all their grievance studies departments. But you will have to send all their faculty members and administrators to Cuba to build homes.
It should be a federal felony to NOT respond with guffaws to claims of “hate speech” or hurt feelings over folks using the wrong pronouns.
You have my vote (even though I don’t believe we will ever pull our self out of the ‘troubles’ at the polls). I’ve commented to others regarding the mess we’re in & I always answer that I do not believe the they can be resolved at the ballot box. Too many problems brought on by a completely corrupt system (not what John Adams & the boys envisioned). Anyway…..what would Civil War 2 look like? I believe it would be like the ‘Irish Troubles’, gorilla warfare with NO central leadership. Just a bunch of folk who have ‘had enough’. No centralized, coherent plan…..just ‘troubles’. When the young have had a belly full & everything falls apart & money is worthless & the legal system finally self-destructs (with the POTUS & others just defying the courts, I believe Andrew Jackson pioneered that action) it will conform to the old Chinese saying “May you live in interesting times).
You have my vote too, even though you’re wrong about China’s infrastructure. You visited for two weeks; I’ve lived here (China) for the last thirteen years. Yes, the Chinese have efficient high-speed-rail travel. But they still don’t have potable public water, and there are signs above many of the urinals in public restrooms urging men not to pee on the floor (“One step closer civilization”). (Someday, there may be similar signs on public shrubbery.) Also, a leaking wall-unit air conditioner can groove ravines into the materials with which they make apartment walls–overnight.
Fred, i’ve read your columns for twenty years. You’ve educated me with your insights as much as you’ve weakened my body with laughter.
Health, long life, and blessings to you!
It’s nice to know that Fred is still writing his wonderful social satire.
And of course, he would make a far better president than most of the Little Lord Fauntleroys we currently have on the National Display.
I just wanted to comment on a few points:
“Under my Affordable Sidewalks Act, I will order the widening of sidewalks everywhere so that all Americans will have a place to live.”
It seems kind of funny that the USA, which has built so many residential buildings over the last century, can’t seem to house all of the people who live there. Does anyone know why is that? I live in an NJ suburb and the property taxes are outrageous. Can someone shed some light on why the rent and price of housing is so high? Where did all of our capitol went?
“Looters will be shot.”
About a year ago, I was in NYC (Manhattan). I spectated a black man crawling into a 7-11, grabbing some merchandise off of a shelf, crawled right back outside, and placed it into an automobile … that was parked right behind a police patrol car. After being absurdly impressed by the bravery of this crook, I turned to the police woman in the car and pointed out the shoplifter to her. She just shrugged her shoulders and drove off.
I might agree totally with Fred’s suggestion that we should use lethal force against looters except for one small detail. In many of the Youtube videos that have surfaced of these mass organized shoplifters / looters, a crowd of punks would come into a store like Target or Best Buy, swarm about to make it difficult for security to catch them, grab whatever they can from the shelves, run back out, and blend in with the public. The problem with using firearms would be that the security guards might hit some innocent bystanders. I think it might be better if there were some sort of gates installed at the store entrance or parking lot so that security could place the whole premises on lock down in the event of a mass looting. Of course, it would be far more expensive than just giving guns to the guards.
“I will designate the American rail system in its entirety as a national museum, which would require only the placing of signs.”
The NYC subway system has always been the least charming part of the city (aside from the vagrants). It is dirty, antiquated, and unsafe – even without the vagrants looking to push you onto the tracks. I wish that it could be gutted and rebuilt except for the huge amount of money it would require. The only problem with abandoning it is that tens of millions of people are dependent on it. NYC, for some miraculous reason, is still the financial hub of the USA.
“I will give that sweat-shirted comedian who runs the Ukraine fifteen minutes to start negotiations or I will coat him in bacon rind and feed him to army ants.”
What is really the situation in Ukraine? Who is winning? Can the Ukrainians really still win the war on their own without American funding? What is the moral sentiment of the Ukrainian solders? What is the moral sentiment of the Russian solders? Everyone seems to have their own opinion on what is going on behind the fog of war.
“I will require that teachers be able to read.”
I have said this on the Unz Review and a lot of other blogs before and I will say this a million more time: Do not make any public education mandatory at all. Do not require attendance of minors by law. Allow any public school system to become a voluntary welfare system. Parents will only enroll their children if they wish. If they don’t wish to enroll, they may be eligible for a voucher or a tax credit that will allow them to enroll their youngsters at a private school (depending on their income level). Parents might even choose not to enroll their children at any school if they wish. That way, any school that has substandard instruction and an unsafe environment will be abandoned by those willing to be educated. This is the best compromise between the free market and making sure that the poor have the ability to receive an education.
Furthermore, make it easier for adolescents to drop out of school, spend a few years in their workplace, and then resume their education once they made up their minds as to what they want to do for the rest of their lives. Make it also easier for young people to hold jobs and attend school at the same time. It is silly to believe that sequestering children for 12 consecutive years will somehow make them into productive adults.
If you open up Cuba, they will just be another country whose refugees will be charging the border of FL, wanting to climb over the fence at Mar-a-Lago.
I would still vote for you. Let’s all do write-in votes for Fred Reed, our benevolent dictator to be.
It’s a pity that as a foreigner I’m not allowed to vote!
I’m willing to vote for you Fred, in a heartbeat. But are you sure you want to be the chief executive of a country that is doing its damnedest to become a smolderong radioactive crater?
Love it – except for your views on the Ukraine. Jeez, the Internet is full of Russian trolls as it is, most of them unintentionally funny and seriously misinformed, buy you, Fred, have more international clout than these dipshits with a keyboard in St Petersburg. Russia is Russia, the Ukraine is the Ukraine,and the latter prefers it that way. It can only retain its sovereignty by fighting back. Negotiating with Putin is waste of time, and he never keeps any agreements that he has made. You might as well negotiate with a junkyard dog. Maybe that would be easier. Don’t bother negotiating until Putin has had his dreadful accident and been replaced by somebody marginally less awful.