Dear President Obama:

I hope you are not offended by the open-letter, blog format I have chosen to correspond with you. Since you are the first president to carry a Blackberry, and probably the first to actually use the Internet for something other than viewing porn, I thought you would find this acceptable.

You seem on the verge of signing the stimulus package into law, and I congratulate you, your diminutive chief of staff, and everyone else who worked to get a bill through Congress (a most recalcitrant legislative body except when it comes to eroding our civil liberties). But let me be forthright: my chief concern at the moment is avoiding riding the hobo train and having to sell my children into indentured servitude. In that light, I fail to see how the "stabilization fund" for the states, which might have allowed my wife and me to remain employed, could be considered "waste" by the likes of Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska--who, by the way, is a dead ringer for Burgermeister Meisterburger:


Keeping people employed and working rather than jobless and on government assistance seems a better investment than tax incentives intended to restart the real estate boom, something which in hindsight looks more and more like tulipomania. I suspect you largely feel the same way, and I understand the necessity of compromising with the addle-pated. This is, after all, a democracy, despite the fervent attempts of the previous administration.

Then there's the matter of TARP and additional funding for bank stabilization. I'm afraid that in his speech earlier this week, Mr. Geithner came across rather like George Costanza in his Breakfast at Tiffany's reading club. He seems torn between actually doing something and continuing to prop up the plunderbund, who by have proven their inability and/or unwillingness to do other than steer our entire way of life off a cliff with a rapidity about which Osama bin Laden could only dream.

As a time- and effort-saving alternative, you could take all of those billions and set fire to them, like the Joker in The Dark Knight, or--let me suggest--you could invest them in a grand project, something that would employ thousands, lead to astounding technological breakthroughs, and solve a broad range of challenges facing us.

And I have just the thing.

It is time to build the Starship Enterprise.

Yes, I know what you're thinking: that could take a really long time. But have you seen From the Earth to the Moon? When President Kennedy proposed sending a man to the moon by the end of the decade, no one had the slightest clue how to do that. And yet they figured it out in just a few years.

By contrast, extensive blueprints and schematics of the Enterprise already exist:


And the phasers. My God, the phasers.

If I recall, a starship like the Enterprise is able to lay waste to an entire planet--which might be nice as a threat, but the real benefit would be surgical strikes.

Just look at what a handheld version did to a giant, one-horned albino ape:


Now just imagine this:


Or this:


Just kidding about the second one! Perish the thought!

There are many non-military benefits of Starfleet technology as well, such as transporters:


and warp drive:


Fuel crisis solved.

We just need to find some dilithium crystals.

At some point, you must surely realize, we have got to get off this godforsaken hellhole. Either some lunatic is going to unleash a weapon, a giant asteroid is going to collide with us, or the industrialists will poison us, and that's all she wrote. If we have the Enterprise, however, we have options. We can travel to all kinds of lovely worlds, such as the one where you are sprayed with a pollen that fills you with the urge to don a jumpsuit and swing merrily upside-down from a tree limb:



Remember: think big. Such a project comes with ready-made grand rhetoric, too: "not because they are easy, but because they are hard," "to boldly go where no one has gone before," etc., etc. Recall that you said that "Nasa . . . is no longer associated with inspiration" and that you "believe in the final frontier."

Finally, lest we forget:


Miniskirts.

They're not sexist, either. It's the future. Everyone's enlightened in the future, so it must be okay.

At the very least, attempting to build the Enterprise is no less promising than handing over hundreds of billions to proven swindlers.

At least consider it.

Your ardent supporter,

Lein Shory

P.S. If you happen to come across this letter and it would not be too much trouble, I would be most appreciative if you were to send me a signed photograph. I have promised my mother, the Republican, that I will hang your likeness in my dining room, and an autographed photo would be so much the better. Thanks!