MOTUS A.D.: Give Peas a Chance

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Give Peas a Chance

Here’s the take-away from yesterday’s presser: you can take the petulant child out of the teleprompter’s speech, butt you can’t take the petulant child out of the ~~reader~~ speaker.

Things got off to a good start, thanks to TOTUS’ carefully crafted remarks, butt then Big Guy took questions from 6 reporters for the remaining 36 minutes of our press conference. That’s an average of 6 minutes per question; too long to keep our unscripted petulant child completely at bay.

Case in point #1

"the debt ceiling should not be … used as a gun against the heads of the American people to extract tax breaks for corporate jet owners, for oil and gas companies that are making billions of dollars because the price of gasoline has gone up so high."

Plus, I see that later on we added a new villain to our “fat cat” category: “best selling authors,” right there next to jet owners and oil barons. Oh, oh! Watch out Tom Friedman!

Back on message:

…if we think it’s hard now, imagine how these guys are going to be thinking six months from now in the middle of election season where they’re all up. It’s not going to get easier. It’s going to get harder. So we might as well do it now -- pull off the Band-Aid; eat our peas. Now is the time to do it. If not now, when?

Here Big Guy manages to get his point across while simultaneously channeling Popeye, Hillel the Elder, and Mitt Romney’s dad – all in one partial answer! Butt while everyone focused on the “eat our peas” part of this answer, they missed the really fun part: “imagine how these guys are going to be thinking six months from now in the middle of election season where they’re all up.” When they’re all up? Hee hee. Let’s see, who else is up for re-election in another six months? Assuming we get re-nominated that is.

I'd rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes -- like new programs or the NFL season getting resolved. Unfortunately, this is what's on our plate.

Anything butt peas!

It’s starting to look like a plateful of peas. And we all know Big Guy doesn’t like to eat his peas.

Then we move on to a concise summary of Big Guy’s economic philosophy:

And I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing, in fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need, while a parent out there who is struggling to figure out how to send their kid to college suddenly finds that they’ve got a couple thousand dollars less in grants or student loans.

“Spread the wealth around.” It’s not like he didn’t tell us about his collectivist feelings before the election. That’s how JTP (Joe the Plumber) became Joe the Plumber.

And Tom Friedman will be relieved to know that the “best selling author” Big Guy was talking about was – himself! Although, since Bill Ayers wrote Big Guy’s best seller, I suspect we’ll be expecting him to pay the additional taxes as well. And Tom, you’re going to be called on to spread your wealth around too. It’s for a good cause: in order to keep that hot, crowded earth of yours flat.

I understand that an overnight poll has indicated that most Americans feel as though they’ve been eating way too many peas for the past 2 1/2 years and they don’t want any more. In fact, a lot of them are starting to ask “Where’s the beef?”

Not to worry. Lady M’s located it. At the Shake Shack:

Along with the fries:

And the shakes:

Throw in a zero-calorie diet Pepsi to bring the “occasional splurge” to a nice, round 1700 calorie “treat.”

“It’s about moderation!”

I know we’re going to catch flak over this very public burger spree. I told her she should do takeout. That way she could have had a Guinness chaser instead of a diet Pepsi.

That would add only 170 calories so we could round up the total calorie count to 1900 and call it a day.

Butt no need to panic. I think our PR people have come up with a solution to the “hypocrite” charge that racist tea party zealots are starting to lob around the intertubes. Knowing Lady M’s self-confessed weakness for French fries, we’re going to have our Food Police ~~force~~ incent the Jolly Green Giant to reintroduce a short-lived, ahead-of-its-time vegetable product: the “I hate vegetables” line:

I even located a copy of one of the original boxes on my hard drive from the 1972 Smithsonian file. It’s pure genius: take your freeze-dried powdered vegetables (peas, carrots, spinach, beets or corn) mix them up with dried potato flakes, rehydrate, press the mixture through a French fry die-cut extruder, deep fry and Voila! Vegetable French Fries! Everybody wins! It’s like the deficit reduction-debt ceiling deal Big Guy and John Boehner are working on: it’s going to look like a deficit reduction in return for an increase in the debt ceiling, butt it’s really going to be… peas! (in the form of a tax increase – pure genius)

“These make great French fries too!”

Problem solved. We present the illusion of wholesome goodness while continuing to enjoy the greasy crunchiness of fried food: win, win! Sounds like passive aggression to me.

Burger and fry snack, before our photo ban on burgers and fries went into effect