Why George Bush is smarter than al-Qaeda

By Charles Austin

Published May 6, 2008

A few weeks ago I watched “Deal or No Deal” for the first time ever. Not because it’s a good show (it’s actually the single worst game show ever invented), but because President Bush was scheduled to make a cameo. And sure enough, after wasting 40 minutes of my precious time, he did just that. He appeared via a prerecorded message and made stupid, self-deprecating jokes.

“I’m thrilled to be anywhere with high ratings these days,” he said, and everybody laughed. It’s funny because it’s true.

In the pantheon of great Bush blunders, going on “Deal or No Deal” is probably one of the smartest things that he has ever done, which is a shame when you consider that all his actual political endeavors have fallen so pathetically short. But going on “Deal or No Deal” shows that George Bush understands the same thing that advertisers understand: You want to be where the people are.

Thirty seconds before George Bush made his “Deal or No Deal” cameo, Coca-Cola did the same thing. Advertisers (obviously) use TV to promote themselves, and now politicians use the same strategy. George Bush’s cameo amounted to absolutely nothing more than a plea for popularity. At first this just struck me as ridiculous, but then I started to think about — and I’m only half-joking when I question this — why serious politicians haven’t begun to take to overt commercial endorsements.

Stephen Colbert has caught onto this fad by ironically funding both his political campaign and his Democratic primary coverage with a sponsorship from Doritos, and this is funny until you stop to consider the fact that Senators Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all appeared on a WWE program to recite trite slogans in hopes of potentially winning the 12-year-old idiot vote.

But all of this is obvious. We’ve all seen Barack Obama go bowling and Hillary Clinton take shots at this point. All of this is so obvious, in fact, that I am completely and legitimately surprised that America’s enemies haven’t caught on yet.

Before now, I could hold off judgment on al-Qaeda’s intellect. I’ve always known their morals and tactics are atrocious and beyond justification, but their intellectual capacity was up for debate. I can now, however, conclusively declare that they are stupid, and it’s because they don’t understand a single thing about the American culture they claim to hate so much.

If the terrorists want to destroy our economy and culture so badly, they need to embrace it in the same way as our own politicians. If Osama bin Laden released a tape addressed to the United States in which he was drinking a Pepsi and wearing a New England Patriots jersey, can you imagine the negative repercussions that would come about for those franchises?

No one would ever admit to being a Patriots fan any longer and Pepsi would plummet to Diet Rite levels of unpopularity. The best way to destroy any system is from the inside, and al-Qaida seems to be too stupid to understand this in any meaningful way. If they ever try to execute more attacks on us, it would only galvanize us against them further, and that would never work to their advantage. By embracing our own culture, they could potentially get us to reject it.

I realize now that I am providing aid to all the terrorists who read The Maneater, and that’s exactly the kind of thing the Bush administration has warned against. I’d better keep my mouth shut!