The Prisoner

Mack Hall

By the time we finish with him, he won't know whether he's Number 6 or the cube root of infinity.

-- Number 2 in The Prisoner

Once again America has changed governments without any violence other than the occasional storming of a parade-route porta-potty by unrestrained hordes of liberal arts majors who had to let their magna grande cups of lattepuccinis go. A young man who was raised in a little log cabin in Hawaii now lives at the ritziest address this side of Buckingham Palace, and America goes on and on. How do you like them apples, General Lord Cornwallis?

President Obama will now wake up every morning for the next four years realizing that he, and he alone, must in the name of the Land of the Free face unspeakable horrors that would cower a lesser man, said horrors being Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.

On the occasion of an inauguration it is a custom for almost everyone within reach of a keyboard to tap out an open letter telling the new President how to run the nation. It is a custom of the new President to ignore said open letters because, after all, he got elected and the rest of us didn’t.

Even so, I will now exercise my First Amendment right to be unread.

Dear President Obama:

Avoid the exotic foo-foo pooches; get a nice brace of beagles for the kids. Don’t do a Lyndon Johnson and pick ‘em up by the ears.

Keep your Blackberry. Don’t let people push you around about that.

If you keep channeling Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden’s going to start thinking more and more about how to call in the boys in the white coats.

Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State – what were you thinking? I got two words for ya: Lady Macbeth. Watch out for floating cutlery.

Could you please make Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton co-ambassadors to Estonia, and then accidentally forget to budget return tickets?

I’ve always wondered – is the Surgeon General a real general?

Get out into the country often. Walk in the woods in all seasons. Go fishing. Go hunting. Sit around a campfire and smoke cigars and enjoy a little of Scotland’s one gift to civilization with some guys who don’t wear suits.

About Vladimir Putin -- anyone who looks so much like Dobbie-the-House-Elf is not be trusted.

I love the new wheels. Is the engine a hybrid?

Telephone Rush Limbaugh and ask him if he’s registered to vote.

You do know that global warming is a fraud, right? Always remember that big coat you wore for your inauguration.

Don’t even imagine that you are The One to the guy who had to clean out those 5,000 one-holers.

You are now The Man. Be The Man. Be General Patton, not Doctor Phil. A great nation requires a great leader, not a therapist. You are now the Commander-in-Chief, not a Chicago politician.

Don’t be a prisoner of the closed Byzantine rigidity of the insider sub-culture. Don’t believe what your briefcase-carriers tell you. Listen outside The Village.

Be seeing you!