By Mike Gillis
For decades, I have been known as one of the most significant voices in the Republican Party. I have advised the Bushes. I’ve aided the Quayles. I’ve tenderly kissed the Cheneys. But today I come to you to reveal that I am leaving this beloved party of mine—the party that educated me, housed me, tickled me, and dressed me up as a donkey and forced me to run drunkenly through the streets of Iowa to scare voters in the 1984 Presidential election.
It is not easy for me to say this, because the G.O.P. raised me. I grew up being fed fresh-baked cookies by George H. W. Bush every day after school. I was burped as a baby by Ronald Reagan. Dr. Henry Kissinger himself delivered me and slapped my rear in the delivery room. My mother and my father were Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon.
Yet I cannot stand idly by and watch as these crooks take over the party I love. I cannot abide this coarsening of discourse, and so on and so forth, etc., etc. Here are the reasons that I am leaving the Republican Party.
Firstly, our country is being ruthlessly divided by the Commander-in-Chief. Brother pitted against brother, cat against dog, exterminator against cockroach, sentient robot against mad inventor. Americans must accept that, no matter our particular beliefs, we are all citizens of the United States—whether we be Republican or Democrat, Canadian or Bulgarian, Mesopotamian or Sumerian.
Secondly, as an elder statesman, I recall a kinder, more genteel time in Congress, when Democrats and Republicans not only worked together but were, in fact, fused into a single amorphous entity, composed of writhing flesh and gravel-grasping tendrils, which governed the entire nation through fear and its hive-mind-like consciousness. Did we live in abject horror of that grotesque bipartisan creature, as it rolled through the Senate, destroying podiums and devouring congressional aides to sate its blind lust for power? Yes. But did we respect it? Of course, we did. Its psychosonic mental energy commanded us to do just that.
That’s what being American used to mean.
Finally, I must impress upon my former colleagues that real Americans do not pledge fealty to a strongman. They do not get down on their knees to kiss the boots of an elected official while crying, “Oh, I love you so much, mwah, mwah, mwah, such a nice boot, I love this boot,” until, out of embarrassment, an aide has to slowly pry them off the guy’s leg. And then everyone is just kind of standing around, wondering, What the hell is that guy’s problem? Is he just obsessed with shoes, or what? Americans don’t do that. They don’t even like shoes that much.
Ultimately, the rank partisanship of our current era is what the Founding Fathers feared most. Well, except for John Jay. He was terrified of goblins. Benjamin Franklin also thought goblins were real, and James Madison was scared of goblins, too. Also, John Hancock and Alexander Hamilton really talked about goblins a lot in their journals. Come to think of it, almost all of the Founding Fathers were really scared of goblins. But after that came hatred of partisanship. And fear of vampires.
In closing, today I depart from the party I once loved so much with great anxiety for the future of our country but also an abiding faith in the ability of our citizens to rise above their petty disagreements and give me a multimillion-dollar contract at a cable news network. We, as a nation, have blindly forgiven far worse than what I’ve done, and I sincerely believe we can do it again. All that it takes is everyone suffering severe head trauma and forgetting the past forty years of my actions and beliefs. Then, and only then, can we transcend the divisiveness of the current moment and move on to a glorious new world in which I can afford a nice renovation of my kitchen, with one of those refrigerators that’s built right into the wooden cabinetry.
God bless you all.
