Freedom Excuse

It’s the Fourth of July; I’m celebrating my freedom. Here is a story about how I choose to do it:

You might think the Evil Robot James Buchanan would choose Independence Day as his special day to terrorize, given that his despicable brain patterns are based on a man who terrorized the country as an ineffectual president for four long years. But his brain-child has never tried to ruin the country’s birthday; the Evil Robot James Buchanan takes off all patriotic holidays as the excessive love of country sickens (and weakens) him. Also, no one has sent him a President’s Day card in a century, except for the director of Wheatland, his presidential home. And that’s just a pity card. He knows that — he’s not fooling himself, even if he does tell everyone President’s Day is just a made-up, Hallmark holiday. What really galls him is that Robot Lincoln gets tons of the cards; if only his progenitor had been able to end / stop the Civil War! Of course, if that had happened, Evil Robot James Buchanan would not be Evil Robot James Buchanan, and James Buchanan wouldn’t have been James Buchanan: he would have been competent.

I used to have a standing battle on July 4th against Red Tape, the Communist bureaucrat supervillain; it was a home-and-home thing, where he’d come over here on our Independence Day, and I’d head to Moscow or Riga or Astana or some damn place on May 1. (It’s still cold in most of country at that time of year, let me tell you; he could never figure out why I kept attacking the Crimea.) But since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the metamorphosis of Communist rulers into capitalist oligarchs, the matchup hasn’t had the same juice. We discontinued it after September 11; it just seemed tacky then. There’s some talk of him rebranding himself “Kleptocrat” or “Sticky Fingers,” a tool of the corrupt, but we both know that’s just talk. It’s sad, really. I have dozens of Yakov Smirnoff jokes I’m never going to get to use.

So the last few years I’ve been squaring off against a British brawler named John Bullsh*t, but frankly, he stinks. His fighting moves are crap, his quips are simply gutter level, and he’s a stain on the British national character. And he’s probably going to curl up in the bathroom and cry himself to sleep when he reads this. Boo-frickin’-hoo, John. Go buy yourself a stiff upper lip.

So I throw this open to my readers: do you know anyone who would make a good sparring partner for the Fourth of July?