Mad Atoms

This election cycle was a weird wild ride, and that's only highlighted what a stark crash back into the mundane these past couple months have been. Watching the Obama administration take shape, slowly, calmly, orderly, has been like watching the Lakers bring home a clutch championship and then following Kobe home to watch him pick out suits for a series of important business meetings. These proceedings could really do with a little of the snap and zazz that Hollywood has founded an empire on.  What if instead of boring intellectuals and policy specialists, Obama nominated.....

Secretary of Defense - Iron Man: Billionaire Tony Stark is a successful industrialist and also a brilliant engineer. He's got the intellectual horsepower to handle complex international relations.  Plus, based on what I've seen of that suit, we could pretty much eliminate every other branch of that department as well as disband all the armies. What government couldn't use an extra $600 billion a year these days? But if we ever needed to fight China and something on the suit broke, we'd kind of be over a barrel there. Tony certainly outsourced a good bit of the manufacture to them. Come to think of it, they would probably just build another one and strap it on Chow Yun Fat, giving them an obvious edge.

Secretary of Labor - The Tom Hanks character from ‘A League of Their Own’: His experiences coaching an all-women’s baseball team at the height of the Second World War, sometimes poignant, often hilarious, uniquely suit him to bridge the gender gap in the workplace today. The only X factor might be a deep and enduring hatred of ethnic minorities. I don’t think it was explored in the film, but he’s a working-class white guy from the 40’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if it all came out in the confirmation hearing when a Latino member of the catering staff gripped his courtesy water a little too near the rim during a refill.

Ambassador to the United Nations - The Animatronic T-Rex from ‘Jurassic Park‘: Remember that time Nikita Khrushchev flipped out and started banging his shoe on his desk at one of these meetings? It would have been pretty handy to have a representative who could rebut with a roar so loud that it flipped his desk over and then pinned him under said desk with one massive foot. I will acknowledge that it’d be difficult to find a dinosaur translator, so maybe instead he could be fitted with a saddle and megaphone so that Ron Paul could ride him places, possibly while wearing an enormous ten gallon hat. That guy should walk away from all this with SOMETHING, and I think they made him give that blimp back. And besides, who else is going to inspire people on the internet to develop superiority complexes and a superficially inflated sense of intelligence?