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The Secession Petition: The President’s Response

The much-discussed Texas seces­sion peti­tion on whitehouse.gov:

We peti­tion the Obama admin­is­tra­tion to:

Peace­fully grant the State of Texas to with­draw from the United States of Amer­ica and cre­ate its own NEW government.

Here’s how I might respond, were I the Pres­i­dent of the United States:

To all the peo­ple who have signed this petition:

Look, I appre­ci­ate that you’re frus­trated, and I’ll do what I am able to restore your con­fi­dence in the Union.

But I’ve gotta tell you: you haven’t actu­ally asked me to do any­thing. “Peace­fully grant the State of Texas to with­draw from the United States of Amer­ica and cre­ate its own NEW gov­ern­ment” doesn’t mean any­thing. Grant Texas what? Grant Texas per­mis­sion? Grant Texas the right? 

If you had asked me to grant Texas per­mis­sion to secede, I’d hap­pily have given it. Seri­ously. Thirty-four solidly Repub­li­can elec­toral votes, two Repub­li­can sen­a­tors, and a net loss of four­teen Repub­li­cans in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives? It’s a polit­i­cal no-brainer: god­speed, and good luck secur­ing your south­ern bor­der. Of course, my per­mis­sion to secede and a buck fifty still won’t buy you a decent cup of cof­fee: if you want out, you’re going to have to sell it in Congress.

But here’s the thing: you didn’t ask my per­mis­sion, and because over a hun­dred thou­sand of you (I’m not count­ing those in other states who think you’re a bunch of igno­rant red­necks and want to be rid of you—because they’re wrong) clam­ored for my atten­tion by sign­ing a semi­lit­er­ate peti­tion ask­ing that I grant you absolutely noth­ing, I am con­cerned for you. The intel­lec­tual deficit you demon­strate by tak­ing seri­ously this mean­ing­less non­sense sug­gests that you’re in need of adult super­vi­sion, if not guardianship.

I have seri­ously con­sid­ered this grave sit­u­a­tion, prayed on it (see, I knew you’d like that), and decided to have you eval­u­ated for com­pe­tency. Five hun­dred of you will be ran­domly cho­sen as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple, black-bagged, and dis­ap­peared tem­porar­ily for psy­cho­log­i­cal test­ing. Fear not: you will be returned unharmed with your mem­o­ries of the expe­ri­ence erased. Nobody will even know that you were gone. The results of these tests will deter­mine the fate of Texas.

In the unlikely event that most of the five hun­dred cho­sen are com­pe­tent to con­duct your own affairs, I’ll leave Texas alone and get back to the seri­ous busi­ness of bring­ing Marx­ism to North Amer­ica (that’s a joke).

Oth­er­wise, I’ll ask the Supreme Court to appoint a neu­tral third party as Texas’s legal guardian. What third party? You guessed it: the United Nations. 

Expect black heli­copters. I sug­gest you go into hid­ing now.

You bunch of bark­ing moonbats.

—POTUS

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This entry was posted by on Friday, November 16th, 2012 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

About The Author

Mark Bennett got his letter of marque from the Supreme Court of Texas in May 1995. He is famous for having no sense of humor when it comes to totalitarianism.

Comments

14 Responses to “The Secession Petition: The President’s Response”

  1. Mark's Dad says:
    16 November 2012 at 9:47 pm

    I didn’t get the joke.

    Reply
  2. John David Galt says:
    16 November 2012 at 9:49 pm

    Hey Prez: Pot. Ket­tle. Black.

    Reply
  3. Robb Fickman says:
    16 November 2012 at 11:05 pm

    Let them have a coun­try right on the Bor­der. Let these Tea Party Born Again Racist have their nation. And let the Zetas sort them out. Their stu­pid peti­tion is trea­so­nous but not worth a bul­let. They are dogs. Let these trai­tors who have no alle­giance to our Con­sti­tu­tion go to hell or move to fuckin China, North Korea or Iran.

    Trai­tors All.

    Robb Fick­man
    American

    Reply
    • Mark Bennett says:
      17 November 2012 at 7:42 pm

      You and Anne Coul­ter are much too cav­a­lier with the word “treason.”

      Reply
    • Michael Stuart says:
      1 December 2012 at 12:10 pm

      I’m sorry, I must have con­fused who began the destruc­tion of the Constitution.

      In my mis­take, I thought it was the fed­eral gov­ern­ment; the one in vio­la­tion of every sin­gle arti­cle of the Bill of Rights, the one inca­pable of fol­low­ing the most basic of instruc­tions (con­gress alone declares war, only gold and sil­ver are money, no stand­ing army longer than two years…).

      I must also have mis­un­der­stood “trea­son” at some point, hav­ing acci­den­tally missed its inter­pre­ta­tion as “unswerv­ing loy­alty to a par­tic­u­lar gov­ern­ment regard­less of the train of abuses it heaps upon the prin­ci­ples of its founding”.

      My bad.

      Reply
  4. David Ryan says:
    16 November 2012 at 11:53 pm

    For the most part, I enjoyed the deli­ciously caus­tic wit. The over the top reac­tion of some on the right is ironic — these are the same folks who took celebri­ties to task for say­ing they would leave the coun­try if Bush was re-elected. Such hue and cry…

    I did not vote for Obama in either elec­tion. I oppose most of his social agenda. How­ever, the elec­tion is over, Obama won, and now it is time to get on with address­ing the press­ing mat­ters fac­ing the coun­try. If “these col­ors don’t run” has mean­ing, then the oppo­si­tion must stand it’s ground for the prin­ci­ples it expouses.

    My one quib­ble with you, Scribe, is the unfor­tu­nate threat to black bag and dis­ap­pear a few folks. I recall you rail­ing against this Pres­i­dent for order­ing the killing of US cit­i­zens over­seas, and this Pres­i­dent defend­ing new leg­is­la­tion per­mit­ting the secret deten­tion of US cit­i­zens in this coun­try indef­i­nitely. I know the humor that was intended, but it still made me wince.

    And I’m not nearly as wor­ried about the black heli­copters as I am the drones from the Mont­gomery County Sheriff’s Office. Some­how I think Ted Poe and you will find com­mon (above) ground on that one.

    Reply
  5. Pam Lakatos says:
    17 November 2012 at 9:23 am

    Thank you for a delight­ful laugh this morn­ing. No mat­ter what hap­pens dur­ing the rest of my day, just the mem­ory of this post will bring a smile and remind me that humor is the best treat­ment for all things that drive me crazy.

    Reply
  6. Jackie Carpenter says:
    20 November 2012 at 4:51 pm

    I wish they would go some­where, but leave Texas out of it. Come up with your own name for your state/country or what­ever it will be. I do like the lev­ity in the let­ter though. Thanks, Mark.

    Reply
  7. Patrick Griffin says:
    21 November 2012 at 7:54 pm

    This is just fan­tas­tic.… such a great kick to the knee for all those bril­liant humans who think the POTUS is 100% in charge of mak­ing any­thing hap­pen, they always for­get about that tiny branch of gov­ern­ment called congress.

    Reply
  8. Michael Stuart says:
    1 December 2012 at 12:18 pm

    Mark, as ridicu­lous as the actual peti­tion is…impotent, badly-written, mistaken…

    It’s a start. Over 100,000 peo­ple were will­ing to reg­is­ter with whitehouse.gov–which cuts response rates to inter­net polls by a fac­tor of fifty in most cases–and express the desire to secede.

    I find it dif­fi­cult to fault them; they’ve been poi­soned with fluoride/vaccines/gmo’s, their minds destroyed in gov­ern­ment indoc­tri­na­tion camps, and their his­tory stolen and pro­pa­gan­dized. Nat­u­rally their think­ing will be a bit muddled.

    I’d love pure seces­sion; it’s the eas­i­est peace­ful way out of this mess. But pigs will fly first.

    Some have sug­gested “seces­sion lite”–reframing the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence today and instead of seced­ing, FIRING the hijacked and crim­i­nal fed­eral government.

    Because at the heart of it, Tex­ans don’t want to secede from the idea of Amer­ica; they want to secede from a fed­eral gov­ern­ment that is no longer America.

    Reply
  9. Bryab Simmons says:
    20 December 2012 at 3:34 pm

    When they fig­ure out that Texas, much like that lib­er­tar­ian par­adise Alaska, is just another red state wel­fare queen, tak­ing far more dol­lars from the hated Wash­ing­ton gub’mint than they pay in. This is true for basi­cally all the hard-core red states. Idiots.

    Reply

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