Cherokee Sage Woman

WHERE DAVE BARRY STANDS ON….

CRIME

You can call me courageous if you want, but I am against crime. I favor the death penalty for everything, including zoning violations. In the case of really, really bad criminals -- especially murderers and whoever is responsible for putting Jerry Springer on television -- I support a massive government project to develop a way to bring them back to life after we execute them, so we can execute them again.

TAXES

A lot of my opponents have been going around spouting harebrained "pie-in-the-sky" tax schemes that promise "something for nothing." Well I say it's time for a "reality check." I favor a practical, fiscally sound, two-pronged "flat-tax" system, as follows:

PRONG ONE -- Everybody would pay less.

PRONG TWO -- You, personally, would pay nothing.

SOCIAL SECURITY

You hear a lot of talk these days about how the government cannot afford to keep giving more and more billions of dollars in Medicare and Social Security benefits to the elderly, especially to the wealthy, golf-playing, boat-owning, Lincoln-driving, mansion-dwelling, servant-lashing elderly. Well, here's what I say: I personally am well on my way to elderlyhood, and if I'm going to suffer from joint pain, gum disease, vision loss, irregularity, bladder malfunction, prostate disorders, hemorrhoidal swelling and an inexplicable fondness for reruns of "Murder, She Wrote," then by gosh I WANT MONEY FROM THE GOVERNMENT.

DRUGS

I admit that, back in the Sixties when everybody was doing it, I may have stuck a few syringes in my arm. But I never pushed the plunger.

STANDARDIZED NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL TESTS

I believe that American schoolchildren should be given standardized national educational tests, and I will tell you exactly why: Because I am not a schoolchild. I am strongly in favor of things that I, personally, do not have to do. Childbirth is another example.

HEALTH CARE

As an older male American, I believe that our Number One health-care priority, as a nation, must be to make the medical profession find some way to get to the prostate gland other than the way they're getting to it now.

FOREIGN POLICY

I am sick and tired of watching the United States get pushed around by dirtbag nations such as Iraq. If I were president, and Saddam Hussein gave me any trouble, I would unleash the ultimate weapon on him. That's right: I would have a bomber fly right over downtown Baghdad, open the bomb doors, and drop: lawyers. If that didn't paralyze Iraq, I would drop more lawyers; and if THAT didn't work, I would put parachutes on the lawyers.

SEX IN THE OVAL OFFICE

The Oval Office is a sacred shrine of our great republic, and it is just plain wrong for the president to have sex there. He should go out on the lawn.