THE REASON IS MATH: BUSH EDIT
My Fellow Americans.
I speak to you today on a matter of great importance, a matter that affects the very fabric of our nationhood. You no doubt know that it is the intention of the White House to increase America’s military engagement in Iraq – more bluntly, to send in even more of our fine citizens into the area. Today, I would like to speak to you, the American people, on why we have chosen such a route. I would like to speak to you on why we feel this is the best route – a hard but worthy choice in a political situation that represents one of our greatest challenges in history.
The reason that this is the best route is simple, my friends. The reason is math.
Now, I know this might trouble the skeptics out there, but the truth is, is that I’ve done a lot of math in my time. For instance, I know a thing or two about budgets, and budgets are the stuff of numbers. I know that a dime has ten cents, a dollar has one hundred, and that good old Abe Lincoln is worth 500 cents. I also know that when you add those numbers up you get 610. And maybe even more important, is the fact that I know all of these numbers are integers, a word that I am not afraid to use.
Here’s another example. Nowadays, I hear the word genetics a lot in all of this stem cell technology stuff. I can tell you that I know that genetics is about the DNA, which is composed of four different nucleotides. Not three, not five, but four. That’s also math. Now I might not know what the nucleotides are themselves, but the reality is, my friends, is that that’s just not important. That’s genetics and stem cell stuff, people – not math. And the reason for sending more troops into Iraq isn’t about genetics and stem cell stuff – it’s about math.
If I haven’t convinced you yet, then you should also know that I’ve done a lot of math in other aspects of my role as the President. Like the time when my religious friends said that human beings and the Earth were created in seven days, and my scientific friends said, “No, Mr President. If you include Homo sapiens, it actually took about four and a half billion years.”
And you know what I did? I took the mean value between the two – I said, “Let’s just say that the length of time is the average between the two, because then you get two and a quarter billion years old, and that’s a value I can live with.”
I’m also pretty good with graphs. Seriously, I can’t tell you how many weather graphs I’ve seen lately. Graphs about temperature, rainfall, wind speeds, graphs about gases of some sort. But it’s all good, and now I even like graphs. Graphs are like math in picture form. That helps because sometimes these graphs have fractions and decimal places, which are much more complicated than integers. Anyway, those graphs are all heading up. Which must be fine, because no-one wants to see a graph heading down, right?
So in the end, my fellow Americans, what I hope I’ve done is convince you that my credibility in math is sound. And like I said before, math is the best reason to send in more troops. Basically, if you have more good guys than bad guys, then that just works – it’s as simple as that.
And you must believe in this logic, because there’s even a little special math symbol for things having more than the other – it’s called “greater than” by the way, and it looks a little like a sideways “V.”
So there you have it: “greater than” has its own little symbol. Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m saying that my reasoning for sending more troops even has its own little math symbol, and really now, you can’t argue with that. Besides, isn’t that what we in America aspire to? To be “greater than,” integers and all.