Interrogating Presidential Candidates

A dishonest man who deals in half-truths and whose true plans and motivations aren’t known is about to get his hands on nuclear weapons. I’m speaking, of course, of the scenario for every U.S. presidential election for the past several decades.

Why are we okay with politicians lying to us? Like with Obama’s claim that his “you didn’t build that” speech was actually pro-business and Romney’s switch from the left to the right on many issues, we know they’re not being honest with us, but all we do is shrug our shoulders. Lying is so expected that the politicians don’t even try to hide it very well, because they know our reaction to being lied to will be to simply roll our eyes and say, “Oh, you rascally, untrustworthy politicians; here’s the national checkbook and some nuclear launch codes.”

This is insanity. We need to take a much more adversarial approach with our politicians. During presidential elections, there’s always a poll about which candidate people would rather have a beer with, but I wouldn’t drink with either of them out of fear that as soon as I turned my head, they’d put something in my drink. You’ve seen what these people do to our money; they’re certainly not above giving us a roofie and doing weird stuff to us while we’re unconscious. These people constantly try to trick us and are not our friends, and we need to treat them appropriately. Friends don’t lie to you, boss you around, and then spend trillions of dollars they don’t have and expect your kids to pay for their spending. Most enemies won’t even do that.

So how should we treat politicians? Well, let’s think about this logically. If you had a terrorist in custody and knew he was lying to you, would you just throw up your hands and say, “That’s just how terrorists are, God bless ’em!”? No, you would hand that terrorist over to the CIA, and, using techniques that a man who shot his friend in the face with a shotgun thought were legally justifiable, they would get the truth out of him. Well, presidential candidates will potentially have even more destructive power than any terrorist, and we also know they are lying to us. Thus we should be determined to get the truth from them by any means necessary.

At some point during every presidential campaign, each candidate should be kidnapped in the night by the CIA and subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. This is just common sense. Then we can finally get the full truth out of those politicians, as we’ll completely break them down and make them admit everything. No more pap about what their first one hundred days will be like — we’re going to make them tell us everything they actually will do so we can put a stop to their nefarious plans (or a start to, if we happen to agree with them politically). And a candidate will no longer be able to dance around an issue, because if he wants to stop being doused with cold water, he’d better offer more substantial answers than talking points.

And then on Election Day we’ll get to do what we have never gotten to do before: vote knowing the full truth about our candidates. Won’t we have much more confidence in a candidate’s promise not to raise taxes on the middle class if he was still singing that tune after a week of sleep deprivation? But if he instead broke and cried, “Okay! I admit it! I want to raise all their taxes! Rich, poor, middle class, children, dogs, cats, sea mammals if that’s possible — I want to tax them all!” that’s probably good to know, too. And do the candidates really support our Second Amendment rights, or are they just saying that for now because they think it’s politically necessary? Some good, old-fashioned belly slaps will help us know for sure.

Now, some people will say we shouldn’t subject presidential candidates to harsh interrogation methods like waterboarding. These people are called “politician sympathizers” and are no better than the politicians themselves. They should probably also be waterboarded to make sure they’re not hiding any politician’s secrets. Because the fact is if politicians don’t want to be slapped and put in stress positions for hours at a time, they shouldn’t lie to our faces. And if we make it clear we won’t stand for being lied to, candidates might just go ahead and tell us the truth from the start so that we might not whisk them away to Gitmo. Or they’ll at least put more effort into lying so they’re not quite so blatantly obvious about it. Really, you just suddenly “evolved” on an issue? Don’t treat us like idiots, and we won’t treat you like terrorists.