Episode 12: T Boone Learns About War as a Campaign Strategy

[ThShifties]

T. Boone Pickens, legendary billionaire, is meeting privately over dinner with Senator McCain and his senior advisor, Karl Rove. McCain is answering questions about his plans for America. Rove is strangely quiet.

Pickens: So tell me how you plan to get us out of Iraq, John.

McCain: I don’t. It’s the only war we’ve got going. If we got out, we’d be short a war.

Pickens: So your plan is to stay indefinitely.

McCain: My plan is to win. I’m positive we can. It’s a winnable war.

Pickens: All right, for the sake of argument, let’s say we do win. Next week, all our enemies spontaneously decide to surrender to us. Whoever they may turn out to be. Here’s my question: what exactly did we win?

McCain: startled Why, victory, of course.

Pickens: But what do we get from that victory? Territory? Riches? Good-looking whores? There has to be something.

McCain: What about pride? We get to go around telling people we won. They congratulate us. Everybody says we’re the victors.

Pickens: But think of all the money we spent, John. And the money we’re still going to spend to rebuild all the stuff we bombed. There has to be a return on investment.

McCain: considers this, apparently for the first time Well, what about the parade?

Pickens: What parade?

McCain: Maybe even a couple parades. In New York and Washington. We’d probably have a really big one in Arizona. With a band. Several bands.

Pickens: What’s so great about a parade?

McCain: Oh, they’re just wonderful. You get out your old uniform. It can’t be a new uniform, because the point is to show everybody it still fits. Maybe you had to have some minor alterations done, sure. But basically everyone can see you’re not that much fatter than you were at twenty-five. You stayed in shape. You kept your figure.

Pickens: John, I feel like we’re speaking different languages. Now I read history. All through history, nations fought wars in order to gain something. So what did we gain in Iraq? Was it the oil? How about oil?

McCain: What about it?

Pickens: Don’t you care about the oil?

McCain: Not really. As long as the oil companies keep giving me money for my campaign, I pretend to. But really, I don’t understand oil. It’s like the economy. There’s all these numbers, and you have to listen to experts saying things like “at the end of the day” and “going forward”. Frankly, it gives me a headache. Now war, there’s something I understand.

Did you know I was in the war? I’m a hero. Even my opponent says so. It’s the only he says that I agree with. muttering Or understand, usually.

Pickens: It sounds like we would keep fighting in Iraq because you like fighting in Iraq.

McCain: If I didn’t have that war, I’d just have to go find another one. You need a war to be great. Remember back when Phoenix didn’t have its own NFL team? Everybody said we were a second-class city. And then we got an NFL team, and all of a sudden people said we were a major-league city.

Pickens: You like war, don’t you?

McCain: I hate war. It’s winning I like.

Pickens: Even if you’re not sure exactly what you won.

McCain: The parade would be really nice. Of course you’d have to have the uniform cleaned, it probably smells of mothballs by now.

Pickens: I will never understand the military mind.

Karl Rove: I told you not to ask him. Leave the guy alone. At least he does what he’s told.

Pickens: I guess that’s something.

Rove: Pretty much the most you can hope for, these days.