Republicans are always short on excuses for who they are and what they do. So I’ve drawn up a list of excuses for Republicans. It can be printed on a handy three-by-five card and carried in a suit pocket or slipped into a golf bag.
1. I can identify my clothes by smell. That way, when I’m getting dressed in the dark, I don’t accidentally wind up in a Norma Kamali skirt and a pair of Joan and David lizard pumps.
2. Cigars produce more secondary smoke. Thus antismoking types are killed off faster.
3. I’d feel like a jerk serving brandy and Freedent.
4. Tell the following anecdote: Years ago I was on the porch of a little inn on the coast of Maine. An old lady was sitting in a rocker. I asked would she mind if I smoked a cigar. “Young man,” she said, “when I was a little girl my mother told me never to object when a man lights a cigar. ‘Where there are cigars,’ said my mother, ‘there is money.’”
5. Cigars are the way I relax and unwind. They’re better for my health than drinking.
1. If I stopped drinking and smoking, it would add ten years to my life. But it would add them to the wrong end.
2. “I was drunk” is a better excuse than “I was stupid.”
3. Weddings, funerals, divorces, hostile takeovers, bankruptcies, tax audits, drops in the NASDAQ, weekends with the family—I’m an occasional drinker.
4. When you’ve been through as many weddings, funerals, divorces, hostile takeovers, bankruptcies, tax audits, drops in the NASDAQ, and weekends with the family as I have, you’ve got some memories you’d like to lose. Drinking causes memory loss.
5. There’s another excuse, but I forget it.
1. A high-powered executive in a high-pressure job may not have time to sail his yacht or fly his plane, but driving a fine performance vehicle is a way for him to relax and unwind twice a day just going back and forth to work. (The president of Porsche once actually said this in an interview. Claim he said it to you.)
2. When I was in high school I promised myself that someday I would get one of these babies. Lots of people abandon their youthful ideals.
3. When a thing gives you honest unalloyed pleasure, you can’t think of it in terms of monetary expense.
4. It’s really an investment.
5. Anyway, it’s cheaper than marrying a woman half my age.
1. Because I can.
2. She loves me for my money—and that’s true love.
3. She believes my stories about the sixties.
4. If she tries to screw me in the divorce, I’ll fire her dad.
5. She’s mellow. She’s laid-back. She doesn’t care if I smoke, drink, drive like hell, and stay out all night.
1. My wife won’t let me.
2. I’m in the middle of a terrible divorce.
3. After I gave up smoking and drinking and sold the Porsche and quit running around with women half my age, I had to do something.
4. One thing I’ve learned in all my years of experience—never make excuses.
5. I used to be a Democrat.