My fellow Americans, the time has come for our nation to rise up and reject the false dichotomies of left and right, to embrace a bold new vision of change, to rally behind a visionary new third party:
Yes, vote yourself Silly in '96 and let the Silly Party enact these daring initiatives:
Health Care
Ever since the last election, Americans have been in a vibrating froth about health care. But the Clintons' health care plan was about as well received as a flatulent hippo, and the Republican plan didn't cover people with existing illnesses, hair, noses, or skin. All throughout the debate, however, Americans were regaled with glowing tales of the Canadian health care system and the high quality, low cost services our neighbors to the north receive. So with this in mind, the Silly Party has formulated a bold and decisive plan to provide health care for all Americans: we're going to STEAL THE CANADIAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM! Yes, the very night that Silly Party candidates take office, a vast convoy of empty semis and moving vans will head north with an armed escort, and return with the pieces of North America's finest health care system neatly wrapped in newspaper and nestled in packing peanuts, ready for consumption by eager and ill Americans!
The National Debt
The national debt has now ballooned to the point where the U.S. government now spends nearly as much in interest each year as it wastes on an entire failed savings and loan. Something must be done, and the Silly Party has a bold plan to ENTIRELY ERASE THE DEBT OVERNIGHT! The solution? Inflation! We'll simply let everyone in the country print money! You'll be able to print your own thousand dollar bills with, say, Tennesee Tuxedo on them, or million dollar bills featuring L. Ron Hubbard, or billion dollar bills with your pet parakeet's picture. The resulting frenzy of consumption will reinvigorate our nation's economy as people flock to stores like Viking raiders on crack to dispose of their homemade greenbacks. When the dust settles in the morning, we can present our Japanese creditors with a few trillion-dollar Tony Danza notes and be debt free!
Crime
American jails are stuffed to the gills, with the wait for law libraries and weight lifting gyms approaching 45 minutes in some prisons. But the Silly Party has a solution to EMPTY OUR PRISONS of dangerous felons! Having done exhaustive research consisting of thumbing through an almanac while sitting on the john, members of the Silly Party Think Tank have located a perfect repository for America's least wanted. It's Kerguelen, a remote island in the southern Indian Ocean. Scarcely inhabited but nearly as large as the island of Hawaii, its rocky, windswept, but unfrozen shores will greet repeat offenders deemed too noxious to ever return to America's streets. (While the island is, technically, owned by the French, they could likely be persuaded to part with it in return for, say, the removal of Euro Disney).
Prisoners will be forcibly dropped by parachute from high-flying planes onto the island, where they will be free to form their own government and/or continue conducting themselves in the manner that forced their removal from America. The only stipulation will be that these exiles must coexist to the degree that they can shovel and pack a prescribed quota of penguin guano in return for their monthly food rations. If approaching Chinook helicopters do not see neatly packed crates of penguin poop with easily accessible cargo hooks awaiting them on the beach, they'll simply decline to release their own crates of MRE's, and the new residents will be left to gnaw lichens from the rocks for sustenance. They will, of course, still be required to file tax returns.
Transportation, Disarmament, and Global Warming
You might not be inclined to think of these as complementary topics, but the great minds at the Silly Party have devised related solutions to our problems with all three. We need to relieve congestion on our nation's highways and airways, preserve our flooding coasts, and dispose of thousands of nuclear warheads. The solution? Revive the romantic days of canal-building and water transport with a comprehensive inland waterway system, using our nuclear stockpiles as the excavation tool of choice! While this idea was contemplated and abandoned after brief trials in the former Soviet Union, the Silly Party believes that the dream can be made a reality here in America, the Land of Big Thinkers. And what thought could be bigger than that of thousands of slightly-below-ground nuclear detonations producing an extended Erie Canal linking Buffalo, New York, with Ogden, Utah? We'll sing of fifteen *hundred* miles on the NEW Erie Canal as we watch from afar through cobalt glass at the rapid construction of our new transportation system in the greatest pyrotechnic display since the meteoric destruction of the dinosaurs! Lead-lined ships from trading nations around the world will be able to dock as far inland as Topeka, and there'll be no more hot summers and melting ice caps for years to come with all that topsoil ejected into the stratosphere.
Full Employment and Monuments Galore
Other parties natter on about job training and hiring incentives when discussing unemployment, but the Silly Party has a spectacular plan to not only eliminate employment entirely but also boost tourist revenues and restore pride in America's greatness. We're going to build MONUMENTS. LOTS of monuments. Lots of VERY BIG monuments that will employ thousands in their construction. We'll continue building monuments until every jobless American is involved in construction projects of a scale undreamt of by the pharoahs of Egypt. The Mighty Brass Bagel of Boston, the Thousand Foot Boombox of Buffalo, and the Wink Martindale Colossus of Akron will tower over proud communities selling postcards and chocolate bananas in their shadows.
The Silly Party, however, intends to address not just the problem of the unemployed, but also the misemployed, those whose chosen fields detract notably from the lives of others. Those employed in selected loathsome enterprises and occupations will be given SPECIAL construction projects with a greater order of rigor. New pyramids will be constructed by hand in the Mojave Desert by chain gangs of telephone solicitors. Lawyers will be compelled to hone their shoveling skills amassing the World's Largest Heap of Excrement in Steamy Bayou, Louisiana. And journalists covering the OJ Simpson trial will have to bust a lot of rocks for all the gravel needed to pour the Giant Concrete Butt of Blacktoe, Alaska.
One monument in particular, however, will outshine all others, dwarfing every scrap of human construction previously attempted. This icon of the ages will be the WORLD'S TALLEST THING. Located in a seismically stable region of Kansas, the World's Tallest Thing will resemble a cross between the CN Tower of Toronto and the Mother Ship of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters, on a Vegas theme, times ten. Lasers and lightning will shoot from its ten-mile-high pulsating electric spires. Rocket-powered elevators and hovering zeppelins will transport passengers between adrenaline-charged attractions on its ten thousand floors, including the All-Night Monster Truck Spinning Mud Pit, the Live Indoor Re-enactment of the Battle of Britain, and the Entire Population of Ecuador, resettled in their natural habitat. Families will enjoy watching live battles between giant squid and blue whales in the Towering Electric Musiquarium secure in the knowledge that the World's Tallest Thing has been paid for with just one of the Tony Danza banknotes previously described.
Look for more bold new initiatives from the Silly Party in the months to come, and vote yourself Silly in '96!