“I haven’t seen you in a few weeks, where you been lately?” Pres. George W. Bush asked me, as we sat last night at our usual meeting place, The Sports Bar.

“Eh, dabbling in this and that,” I responded. “Anyway, how’ve you been?”

“Ugh, terrible,” he said. “Seriously, nothing is going my way. It’s one thing after another. Every week I have some new ‘scandal’ to deal with. Be honest with me, is mine the most callous administration you’ve ever seen?”

“Yes. It is,” I told him. “Well, other than Lois DeFleur’s administration, perched up in the eighth floor of the Tower of Orthanc.”

“Yeah,” George said. “Sometimes I feel like she and Rodger Summers really don’t think about the students’ well-being as much as they think about looking impressive for the U.S. News & World Report.”

“What do you mean?” I inquired, surprised by the accuracy of his statement and even more so by his rare display of insight.

“Well,” he began, with an air of expertise that usually only appears when he’s talking about the difference between German and Luxembourgish pretzels, “take, for example, the fact that SUNY Binghamton’s administration put students on academic probation for not completing that mindless Alcohol.Edu program …”

“Oh geez, don’t get me started on that,” I interrupted, flailing my arms willy-nilly in disgust. “You could learn more from a 13-minute Starr Jones monologue on Ugg boots than you could from Alcohol.Edu.”

“Yeah,” George continued. “I heard a rumor that Alcohol.Edu was invented in the late 1970’s by Tito Jackson during an acid trip. He kept saying he’d make the program ‘as easy as 1-2-3.’”

“I heard the same thing,” I said, “only, in the version I heard, Alcohol.Edu was actually the product of a witch’s brew in an alternate — and ultimately unaired — version of Mary Kate and Ashley Olson’s film, ‘Double, Double, Toil and Trouble.’”

“I know what they should do!” I exclaimed, slamming my mug on the counter so hard that my stool nearly tipped backward. “Rather than forcing students to spend several hours inciting irony by getting wasted in front of a computer screen, we should make alcohol education part of the mandatory Residential Life meetings that students attend. Then the education could be engaging and might actually work!”

George was impressed. “Gmail, as obvious and simple as that idea is, it’s still way better than Alcohol.Edu. You know, I could use someone like you on my staff. Alberto Gonzalez is about as good at his job as Fox was at handling the scheduling of ‘Arrested Development.’ You can replace him.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I replied. “Politics really ain’t for me.”

“Yeah,” George agreed. “You suck at that stuff … but not nearly as bad as Alcohol.Edu does at helping students.”

We laughed and toasted another drink.

Graham Kates is a junior political science major.