In which the author imagines the first 100 days of a McCain presidency in an alternate universe.
Day 1: Having spent the nearly three months between election day and inauguration day being brought up to speed by Dick Cheney on effective concealment strategies for the Bush administration's plethoric dirty secrets and giving Vice President Sarah Palin a crash-course in introduction to government, President McCain does not hit the ground running. He is stunned to find out that the September suspension of his campaign did not magically solve the financial crisis and that the fundamentals of the economy are not strong.
Day 2: President McCain nominates the only Republican willing to accept the position as secretary of the Treasury, whose appointment is fast-tracked through Congress in light of the growing economic crisis.
Day 3: Treasury secretary Ron Paul promptly disbands the department of the Treasury.
Days 4-18: The stock markets crash, precipitating a run on the banks, which in turn hastens the financial collapse. Mass chaos erupts across the country. Vice President Palin blames the economic catastrophe on University of Illinois professor William Ayers and calls for his execution. Texas announces its secession from the union. Chuck Norris is elected president of Texistan.
Day 19: President McCain tries to restore order by giving a televised speech which will later become known as the "My Friends, We're Fucked" debacle.
Day 20: Dick Cheney shoots President McCain in the face.
Day 21: President McCain apologizes to Dick Cheney for all the trouble his being shot in the face has caused the former vice president.
Day 22: The National Inquirer publishes a story that secretary of education Ann Coulter is pregnant with President McCain's love child. White House press secretary Jonah Goldberg denies the report, calling it "just another piece of liberal fascism, evidence of the secret history of the American Left, from Mussolini to the politics of meaning." MSNBC's Chuck Todd points out that Mussolini was not part of the American Left, prompting Goldberg to harangue MSNBC into terminating Todd's employment. Todd returns to his previous role as Murray on HBO's Flight of the Conchords.
Days 23-29: Photographic evidence of the McCain-Coulter liaison surfaces and is widely published across the blogosphere, eventually erupting in the mainstream press. Cindy McCain files for divorce. Education secretary Ann Coulter tearfully admits the reports are true.
Day 30: President McCain resigns, making his presidency the shortest in American history by one day. President Sarah Palin, the first female president of the United States, is sworn in. Feminists mourn.
Day 31: President Palin appoints her second-in-command. Samuel "Joe the Vice President" Wurzelbacher's first order of business is to call a press conference where he explains his primary role will be "czar of shit-kicking."
Day 32: With the country having disintegrated into utter pandemonium, President Palin tries to foster national unity by declaring war on Iran. The National Review declares Palin a political savant. The New Republic also backs the invasion, "reluctantly". The American people, now largely subsisting on a diet of venison and Styrofoam, are too busy killing each other for shotgun shells and scrounging through trash piles to properly appreciate her alleged genius.
Days 33-67: 10% of the American population succumbs to rabies.
Day 68: President Palin becomes a grandmother for the second time when her oldest son Track and daughter-in-law Miley Cyrus-Palin have a bouncing baby boy, Trek.
Day 69: The US dollar is officially worth less than a Ron Paul Liberty Dollar, the national currency of Texistan. Canada and Mexico begin construction of giant walls along the United States' northern and southern borders.
Day 70: President Palin finally releases her long-awaited plan for economic recovery. Lacking what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, blogging from his fall-out shelter in an undisclosed location, calls "anything resembling a functional knowledge of finance, commerce, or even basic math," the report inspires further widespread panic among the dwindling numbers of still-sentient Americans.
Days 71-99: The American military stages a coup, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, and redeploying them to the United States, where they remove from the White House and associated cabinet offices President Palin, Joe the Vice President, secretary of state Todd Palin, attorney general Judith Sheindlin, and the rest of the Palin administration, all of whom are deported to Texistan. Several suffer horribly during the swine flu epidemic that follows.
Martial law is instituted to re-establish institutional stability and general order across the 49 states. In what the history books will deem the "Great American Do-Over," military leaders will convince the man who should have been president to come to Washington and assume the presidency, marking the beginning of a period of restoration after our long national nightmare.
Day 100: President Al Gore is sworn in.