What If . . .

by David Kahane

Every comedy starts with a couple of guys tossing out a series of increasingly ridiculous "What if?" questions, until they get to the most idiotic reductio ad absurdum imaginable. So here goes:

What if a guy nobody's ever heard of, from Hawaii no less, with a Muslim African father and a Muslim Indonesian stepfather and a mom from Kansas named Stanley inexplicably glides from Punahou to a short sheep-dip at Occidental to the Frankfurt School's favorite Ivy League haunt, Columbia, to Harvard Law? What if he's such an arrogant, aloof suckup of no particular ability or accomplishment that his fellow students openly ridicule him with the invention of the "Obamamometer," which measures epic brown-nosing on a scale from one to ten? What if he's blissfully unaware of his own deficiencies, and instead comes to believe that he's earned everything that's come his way — or ever will?

And what if this guy — let's give him a patently implausible, comically grandiose name like "Barack Hussein Obama II" — moves to . . . New Jersey? Arkansas? No, I've got it — Chicago, Ill. — falls in with . . . wait for it . . . former domestic-terrorist fugitives, adopts a racist pastor to burnish his hitherto-nonexistent "Christian" credentials, and becomes, say, a state senator? Even better: a U.S. senator! And what if he gets a guy named . . . Jake Lingle, yes, that's it! — to use his Chicago Tribune connections to destroy not one but two opponents, both over divorce records! And what if this obscure senator, after less than two years in Washington and with a grand total of one speech to his credit, decides to run for president on a platform of "fundamental change?"  Read the whole article.