The Moon: Who Will Lead It?

When Newt Gingrich promised in 2012 to colonize the moon if elected president, many scoffed. But Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush said Wednesday that the idea was “pretty cool.”

The New York Times reports:

Speaking to reporters afterward, Mr. Bush was asked who he might place in charge of his moon colony. “There’s lots of people that could be effective leaders of the moon,” he said dryly. “Let me think about it.”

The year: 2017. A meeting is in progress to discuss possible candidates to lead the moon. (Note: Although the technology is not yet in place to sustain a colony on the moon, the new leader of the moon will be tasked with handling all moon-related business from earth, until such time as a colony is established.)

Present at meeting: President Jeb Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Chief Justice Antonin Scalia, Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

Bush: All right, let’s get this started. Who are we thinking?

Carson: I think we need to make sure the colony has guns. There are a lot of villains — not to mention supervillains — in space, and the colonists need to be prepared. Also, cash, as I doubt they take credit cards.

Rumsfeld: Second that.

Bush: Look, stuff happens. The moon will not be gunless.

Trump: Listen, I want to throw my hat in. I could do it. I have people who work for me, poor people, people from outside our borders who love me. The moon people will love working for me, too. I would get along, I think, with any leader of any other planet. Mars, Jupiter, the one with the rings, the one that isn’t a planet anymore. …

Scalia: Pluto.

Trump: Yeah, Pluto. And I will not only work with these leaders, who will love me, by the way, but I will vigorously defend our moon from invaders by building a wall across the dark side of the moon — great album, by the way — and I will make Pluto pay for it.

Bush: There are no leaders of other planets.

Trump: You are telling me that in all the vast reaches of space, on all the billions of stars and planets and asteroids and black holes out there, you can say without a doubt that no one is leading even one of them? Do we know what’s happening on Pluto?

Bush: I can’t say for certain.

Rumsfeld: Well, there are things that we know. And then there are things we think we know, but they are unknown to even us. There are even things we don’t know that we don’t know. Pluto is one of those things.

Trump: Right, we’ve never seen it. We have no idea. For all we know, Pluto could have tons of people, and some of them may have lots of problems, and they would bring those problems to the moon. Some, I assume, may be good people.

Bush: How do we know they’re people?

Trump: Exactly.

Scalia: I think we need to discuss the laws governing the moon before picking a leader.

Bush: Why?

Scalia: Well, for instance, will we have gay marriage on the moon?

Kim Davis: I won’t be signing off on that.

Scalia: Where did you come from?

Davis: I just popped in to see how it was going. I’m the new head of the National Archives.

Carson: Congrats! I know you’ll do a great job of keeping our records intact.

Davis: And if we lose a few …

All laugh

Rumsfeld: Wait a minute. Shouldn’t we be letting the people of the earth choose the new leader of the moon?

All laugh again

Cheney: I’ll do it.

Silence

Carson: What about all the cheese?