The Schrodinger Presidency

I passed up an invitation to go quail hunting this weekend with Dick Cheney to attend “A Showcase for Intelligent Design” , a conference for right-minded scientists.  I do think the vice-president gets a bad rap from time to time and now that he’s the first vice-president to shoot someone since Aaron Burr, I imagine there will be jokes about the 18 hour delay in reporting the incident and the relationship of that to maybe making sure there was no alcohol in the vice president's system by the time anyone knew about it.  I wish I’d been there to protect the vice-president’s reputation personally and I’m sure that Karl would have made certain that I was issued the necessary body armor to go hunting with the man who is just a heart attack away from making Dennis Hastert second in line to the presidency.

If you read the story, you may wonder why guys this age were wandering around with shotguns, full emergency medical crew at the ready, hunting that most predatory of all game birds, the quail.   My image of men in their seventies used to be a bunch of guys playing shuffleboard and gin rummy in Miami.  This is where my ties to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (VRWC) come in handy yet again.  The Vice President wasn’t really hunting.  Ever the patriot, he was personally field testing combat conditions for a senior branch of the National Guard.  If the US wants to maintain the necessary military presence in the Middle East, it may have to raise the recruitment age limit.  When he was younger, the vice-presisdent lost his chance to serve because he was a serious student and thus was forced to seek deferments.  Since his daughter has already “told” before she was asked, he remains the one member of the Cheney family who might serve the noble cause of protecting us against terrorism by serving in Iraq.  While he didn’t exactly shoot a terrorist in this field exercise, he did manage to hit the next best thing, a lawyer. Talk about sending a clear message about tort reform!  

Just because I missed the excitement of seeing the vice-president shoot someone doesn’t mean that I didn’t have an interesting weekend.  The First Annual Intelligent Designers’ Showcase had plenty of fascinating displays.  While I mostly want to tell you about the particle physics breakout section, I do want to mention the two page pamphlet they were passing out on Intelligent Design itself.  Can you believe that someone was able to fit all of the scientific basis for intelligent design onto  a two page pamphlet in twenty four point type complete with pictures, graphs, and a list of seventy five sponsors?  Second, I attended a seminar called “Global Warming Phooey” sponsored by a dozen of the most prominent energy companies in America.  There was “Why Tobacco does not Cause Cancer”  presented by a group of scientists who had spent their entire lives working for cigarette companies.  Who would know better than these folk?  
There was an excellent ethics debate that compared stem cell research to the experiments at Dachau and environmental protesters to terrorists.  The president often gets criticized for ignoring mainstream science, but here was a conference filled with researchers who had been very generously sponsored and even been given key government scientific posts during the W presidency.

Most exciting of all, it turns out that the president himself is on the cutting edge of particle physics research.  He hinted at it recently when he announced that he had used his “super powers” granted in a hidden clause of the constitution to protect Los Angeles’s “Liberty Towers” from destruction by terrorists just months after 9/11.  As the first president with super powers, he is exceptionally modest about his gifts.  In fact, he took care to not even tell the Mayor of Los Angeles that he had saved his city for him.  Some members of the press have speculated that the president really meant the Library Tower in Los Angeles, thus underscoring  the importance of those library searches in the Patriot Act.  In doing so, they simply missed the fact that the president was making a significant announcement –He was subtly letting us know that he’s now free of the conventional time space continuum.  We never knew about the thwarted attack on Liberty Towers because there no longer ever was a Liberty Towers in Los Angeles.  In fact, Liberty in the Unitied States may soon be just a distant and possibly faulty memory where we will be left to wonder if any of our freedom was ever “threatened”.  

As a fan of Batman Begins, I happen to like the concept of a president with superpowers.  Instead of being infinitely stretchable like Reed Richards or the budget deficit, this president has the ability to hear anything and know immediately whether or not it threatens freedom.  It’s clear to me that no one in Congress, no one on any Federal Court where some of the judges were appointed by Democrats, and no one on that silly FISA court can properly appreciate that level of super powers.  They won’t be able to save Gotham for us until it’s too late.  

Now, I think the thing that prevents the public from grasping  or as my friend Pogblog prefers to say “groking” the notion of the super powers-based presidency are some of these snapshots of another kind of president.  There’s the one who ignored that August 6, 2001 memo, the one who didn’t order Rangers into Tora Bora to capture Bin Laden, the one who read “My Pet Goat” to a group of school children, the president who claimed to know nothing about the dangers Katrina posed to the City of New Orleans.  There’s even the Mission Accomplished president landing on that aircraft carrier to announce the end of the War in Iraq two years ago and that guy who was too chicken to meet with a group of mothers who’d lost their children in the war because they wanted to know “Why their kids died?”.  If the president has had these super powers all along, who was this idiot dude also claiming to be the President?

For those of us with a classical conception of presidential physics, these two presidents can’t be reconciled.  In our limited understanding the only explanation that makes sense is that the guy is some combination of idiot and poseur, sort of like one of those guys who wanders around town in a Tom Brady jersey.  He might be 5’4” tall and 300 pounds, but he wants us to believe for a second that he could win three Super Bowls.  I confess.  Even though I work for the VRWC, even I had strongly considered this possibility.
If you really have super powers, shouldn’t you be able to pronounce words like “Nuclear”?  

The Schrodinger Presidency breakout session was genuinely mind expanding.  Twenty years ago, if you wanted to impress someone with your knowledge of modern physics, you would find a way to make a joke about Schrodinger’s Cat.  The “cat” is Schrodinger’s answer to that peacenik-liberal Albert Einstein and is particle physics' equivalent of whether or not the light bulb in the refrigerator goes off when you close the door.  Schrodinger posited the cat as a creature who would either be dead or perfectly healthy whenever one might be able to look inside the box, but somehow no observer could see the moment when the cat became one or the other.  I had never once imagined that our President was so directly involved in research to strengthen our understanding of our universe.

As one of the breakout session leaders explained, “The President volunteered for this experiment when still a very young man and a pilot in the National Guard.  During his tour, the President’s disappearances were frequently unaccounted for because he was already involved in this sequel to the Philadelphia Experiment.”

Apparently one of the side effects of participating in the experiment was that the president often appeared to be drunk.  A cover story was developed, similar to James Frey’s, that George W. Bush was able to cure his alcoholism without the benefit of a 12 step program.  The truth was that he never needed one.  Think about the president's plans to cure our addiction to oil and how at other times in his administration he has appeared to have absolutely no interest in the issue.  

Since that time, the President has jumped back and forth between states of appearing perfectly competent and essentially clueless.  At times, that adds to the sense that the president is confused and incoherent, something that even occasionally worries his supporters.  The president’s super powers have been a product of the Schrodinger presidency.  While it has been extremely valuable to have a president who is capable of listening to every conversation and monitor every e-mail that presents a danger to freedom, justice, and the American way, it also has significant drawbacks.  One such drawback is that the president reacts strongly to criticism and sometimes confuses honest dissent with treasonous activity. The explanation is simple, it literally hurts the president’s super sensitive eardrums.  Some fear that the experiment will ultimately damage his health.  In the meantime, he needs rest to recover which explains his many extended vacations in Crawford and his refusal to meet anyone but his closest advisors last summer.  In the meantime, advisors have counseled him to repeat key phrases to preserve the illusion of constancy between the two states.  You will thus see both the president with super powers and the other guy both perseveratively use words like “Freedom”, “9/11”, “Proud”, “100 percent”, and “Greatest country/army/people in the world.”

I wish I had the clearance to attend the classified portion of the Schrodinger Presideny session, but all Americans should be proud to have a president so willing to occasionally appear incompetent for the sake of protecting us from terrorists who hate freedom.  Now that he has spent 35 years of his life involved in this cutting edge research, W has a deeper understanding of weapons of mass destruction than anyone else in America including Judith Miller.  If you haven’t guessed by now, it is also the reason he appears to have such difficulty pronouncing “Nuclear”, modesty covers up his intimate knowledge of quantum theory.  It is said that 20th century physics helped to end World War 2.  I suspect the Crawford project, also known as the Schrodinger Presidency, will help end terrorism.  Should anything happen to the president in these experiments, we have the comfort and security of knowing that the vice-president is locked and quite possibly loaded.  

link to an old Texas story about how common these accidents really are as in they aren't


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