Humor IV

My parents live in the Bay Area. They don't watch much cable news, and don't understand my penchant for regularly torturing myself with O'Reilly, Hannity, Hageee, and of course, reruns of this crap.

This, however, did get their attention. Enough to have old Abbot Yid get me on the phone and yell, "Who the hell is this jackass?" Aside from interactions with old Chinese female drivers, Abbot doesn't really get angry; just annoyed that he has to share precious oxygen with goofballs who joke about blowing up firemen memorials.

So I wrote this to ease the pain.

Al Qaeda Declines O'Reilly Offer

International terrorist organization Al Qaeda has politely turned down Fox News Anchor Bill O’Reilly’s offer to attack San Francisco, California. O’Reilly made the proposal last week, after saying that San Francisco had, in his mind, “declared itself its own country”. O’Reilly said that, were he President of the United States, his first act would be to negotiate a separate peace with the group in which they were given permission to attack the coastal metropolis of 740,000. “And if Al Qaeda…blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”

Al Qaeda responded over the weekend via its West-Coast spokesman, Farouk Jabir Iqtab. Iqtab said, “At first we were all pretty excited. Being addressed personally by the head of ‘The Great Satan’ and all. Usually we have to content ourselves with some dipshit Secretary of My Ass or a lame op-ed. I told the guys that we were moving up in the world.”

Wahid al-Khattak, assistant to Iqtab, added, “We’ve had our eye on the Golden Gate city for quite a while. You should see our files back in the cave. Every intelligence-gathering mission we send there comes back with the best stories. The food, the sights, the ocean, and of course, a lot of really fun places to plant bombs. Sometimes they can barely tear themselves away.”

However, Iqtab said, after further consideration by a committee, Al Qaeda decided against the idea. “It was a very nice gesture, but then we started wondering about possible strings being attached. Like, are we supposed to send a card afterwards? What about a fruit basket? Will President O’Reilly be willing to reimburse us for our costs, even if we provide our receipts? Can we use Oakland’s airspace to fly planes at the Tower? The more we talked it over, the more we realized there were all these loose ends that really didn’t seem to add up.”

He added, “It’s not that we don’t want to blow the home of both American Sodomites and that Rice-a-Roni crap off the face of the earth. It’s simply that we think we can get a better deal if we focus on the rest of the country, too. Also, last we checked, Mr. O’Reilly was not actually the President, so we’re not sure if this offer is really any good. Our lawyers are still looking into it.”

Franklin Fillmore, a History Professor at Princeton, also raised concerns about the proposal. “Historically, attempts to ‘buy off’ expansionist enemies with a small fraction of what they want hasn’t had a very good track record. I mean, sure, sometimes it works, but usually it just winds up turning into a Hitler-and-Czechoslovakia; Vikings-and-Russia; America-and-anybody else-kind of thing. Give people a beachhead for free and all you’re really doing is inviting them to continue.” Fillmore suggested O’Reilly take one of his classes next semester, or, failing that, open the occasional book.

O’Reilly refused to comment, but San Franciscans had some strong reactions. According to a poll submitted by the San Francisco Chronicle, 30% of San Franciscans said O’Reilly could “suck their nuts”, while 25% said he could only admire them from afar. When asked what San Francisco’s reaction should be, several spirited suggestions were offered, including being shot out of a cannon at the Coit Tower, dropped off in the “bad part” of Baghdad super-glued to a pig and an American flag, and, the most popular, tied to a chair and forced to watch his own show for several weeks.