You Be The President!™

I have to admit that the more I've thought about the Frank Rich-approved notion of Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee as the Two Sides of the one-sided Avoid Clinton-Bush Era Hyperpartisanship (But Not Always Successfully!) coin, the more I like the idea. And the more I like the idea, the more I think what a good fit for a game show it makes. Cut to:

Maddeningly dark and foggy set (sort of a cross between the CSI morgue and a Coldplay concert) with a raised, stainless-steel-and-lexan boxing ring in its center, surrounded by skeletal steel lighting towers. In the ring, on opposite stools, sit Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, each reading a Bible; at its center stands a man in a striped referee shirt, possibly Judge Mills Lane. The surrounding studio seats, dimly perceived, are divided at the cardinal compass points by aisles lit by running lights. As a disembodied voice intones the show's tagline:

Let's meet the next ChallenJARRRRRRRR!

and the crowd screams, lights beneath each aisle flash a random pattern of Red, Blue, Green, or Purple, until they suddenly freeze on one, indicating the politics of the next questioner. Mr. Red comes jogging down the aisle to take his place at the small smoked glass lectern at the side of the ring. The giant holographic clock above the ring is set to 30 seconds. The Mills Lane guy holds his hands, palm up, in front of him, then makes a sweeping official-looking pointing gesture at Mr. Red while saying, "Mr. Red...GO!"

MR. RED: Uh, my name is Nathaniel Abraham, and I'm a Bible-believing Christian, and i was fired from my job at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution because I refuse to believe Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

Okay, I haven't really thought it out past this. Should it be a real competition or a rigged teevee-real competition? Should other contestants--or the disembodied voice--be allowed to chime in with, "But you lied about the job description," or "This is a matter for the courts"? Should the combatants each have a Bully Pulpit card, or get to play a Signing Statement Exemption to block? Should they fight as tag teams, with Obama-Oprah vs. Huckabee and the Masked Dominionist? Should there be a waterboarding segment? I'm just spitballin' here.

(I haven't yet seen anything on Abraham's cv; he either walked a post-grad tightrope worthy of Philippe Petit or his deceptiveness goes back a lot further than Woods Hole. As P.Z. has pointed out, the fact that someone with advanced degrees would even have applied for a job that so ill-suited him is, well, fishy. But it's that "Darwin's Theory of Evolution" bit that caps the deal. No matter how the man got through grad school--excepting a body double--he knows there's no such thing.)