President Me Read online

  On to the debates. I don’t like them. They feel too canned, too prepared. The candidates are just too ready with their stock answers and question dodges. And no one watching has their opinion swayed by debates. All those debates do is reinforce the talking points that have been fed to each side.

  Again, I have a solution—surprise debates! We shouldn’t tell the candidates when and where they’re going to be. The whole thing should be off the cuff. The presidency is a job where you have to think on your feet. We should be able to see this in action. How great would it have been if they had told Romney he was going to a fund-raiser and Obama that he was going to a photo op with a business owner and when they walked into the building there was a capacity crowd and we forced them to sit down with George Stephanopoulos and explain the differences in their health care plans? This is something I will excel in when I run for my second term. That’s what you need in a president. Having all that shit prepared like candidates do for debates would be like if you went to an improv show and they asked for an occupation and a relationship, someone shouted out “crane operator” and “father and son,” and the troupe responded, “Okay, we’re gonna go backstage, choreograph and rehearse a scene, and we’ll be back in a few days.”

  Another thing you see out on the campaign trail that I’m calling for an end to is candidates rolling up their sleeves. Oh, I get it. Sleeves rolled up means he’s ready to work. But you’re not sweating copper pipe, you’re standing in an air-conditioned auditorium and for Christ’s sake you’re wearing man makeup.

  And finally, we need to take a hard look at political ads. No more of the attractive, informed housewife in the political ad. It’s going to ruin my marriage. You see the woman who is dressed down but is clearly an 8.5. She’s just come back from the grocery store and is putting away soup cans while helping the kids with their homework. Her hair is perfect and her house is spotless. Then she says, “Prop 32 claims to help endangered marine mammals, but I’ve read the fine print . . .” Where can I find and marry this woman? Nowhere. Because she doesn’t exist. From now on the ads have to be honest. They’ll have to show an exhausted husband coming home from work and asking, “Did you vote?” and the wife on the couch reading Us Weekly replying, “That was today?”

  I’m Adam Carolla and I approve this chapter.

  1

  THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

  It’s no secret that the American economy is in a shambles because we do a fantastic job of consuming products, but when it comes to making those products, we leave that to our friends in Asia. This hit me hard two years ago when I was in my garage on Christmas Eve putting together a canopy bed for my daughter’s American Girl doll. Not only was I devastated to realize that my daughter’s doll was going to have a better bed than I did when I was a kid, but I noticed all the parts were labeled “Made in China.” I thought, Game over, America. The AMERICAN GIRL dolls are made in China. Is there a sadder statement than that? The only thing worse is that I’m now seeing a lot of products labeled “Hecho en China.” Our country is now full of goods made by people who don’t speak English for people who don’t speak English.

  Why is all our stuff made abroad? Because it’s cheaper and the government (if there even is a government where all this shit is being manufactured) gets the fuck out of the way. That’s not to say I’m down with the child-slave-labor sweatshop stuff, but the massive overregulation we have here in America is not going to make this trade disparity go away. As president, I’m going to get out the big book of commerce codes and take a crab comb to it, because until my administration fixes this, no intelligent American businessman is going to bother trying to compete.

  THE TALE OF RED WINE AND RED TAPE

  I can tell you this from firsthand experience as a small business owner. Many of you probably know that I hock a little product known as Mangria. For those who don’t, here’s a quick background story.

  I drink red wine every night. It helps knock me down after a stressful day. One night I went to pour my second glass and came up a little short. I only had half a glass left. All of you fellow alcoholics have felt this heartache. You turn the bottle over, and a hummingbird beak’s worth of merlot trickles out. I blame the lack of uniformity. I feel like some wine bottles are heavier when empty than others are when they’re full, because the glass is thicker than the windows on the president’s motorcade. Then some have that inny belly button on the bottom that goes up three inches. That divot displaces two glasses of wine, I’m convinced. You can drop a digit on that thing and your finger will just keep going. Sometimes you grab the bottom and your finger goes up an eighth of an inch, but other times it’s like you’re finger-blasting Rebel Wilson. I don’t want to have to give my wine bottle a prostate exam to figure out if I’m going to be able to get drunk.

  So with the half glass and half buzz mocking me, I got mad, went mad scientist, and dumped a little vodka in there. At this point I was looking for function, not form. Well, it tasted like ass. But I wasn’t going to waste good booze. There are children in Africa who go to bed every night without a buzz. So I went to the fridge and tossed in some orange juice. Much better. I now had my prototype for a powerful sangria. The next day when I was discussing it at my AA meeting—I mean, on the podcast—I dubbed it Mangria. It started kind of as a joke, me mixing up batches of the stuff and bringing it to Kimmel’s for football Sunday. Then people started requesting it. Eventually, after a lot of talk about it on the show, someone from a winery in Napa approached me about bottling my concoction. As of the time of this printing, we have sold over two hundred and eighty thousand bottles.

  This all came through hard work, innovation, and captured opportunities. But it was sure as shit not the result of the government. I built it. All the government has done is get in the way and take money at every turn. It’s one big bureaucratic clusterfuck.

  First, the shipping is a problem. We’re still not able to ship to every state. That is the biggest complaint I hear when I’m on the road. “How come I can’t get Mangria in Maryland?” I was on a plane sitting next to a guy from Massachusetts who wanted to try some, but that’s one of our no-ship states. You know Massachusetts; it’s not a big drinking state. Most of those Sox games are dry. It’s like an Amish barn raising there.

  And getting it into stores is rough. You have to deal with a completely mobbed-up distributor system that is totally at the mercy of the various state agencies.

  Why the fuck can’t we get on the same page? I’m pretty sure alcohol has been around for a few years now. And we all love it. Shouldn’t we have figured this out after Prohibition ended? It’s not like wine is this new product that hasn’t been fully tested. People in Mississippi and Minnesota both love wine. Why should I be able to sell my product to one but not the other?

  That problem isn’t just with the state governments. When it comes to the feds, they really slow your roll. Mangria almost didn’t make it to market because of the red tape around the label. Anytime you bottle wine, you have to have your label approved by the Tax and Trade Board of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That’s right, the ATF gets to decide what I put on my product label. So when we first attempted to put it out, we wrote a little blurb for the back of the bottle about how it was created. It went like this:

  As a nightly consumer of red wine I was shocked one evening to find I had just half a glass left in the bottle. So I did what any decent alcoholic, ex-con American would do . . . I went to the fridge and the liquor cabinet, then poured, mixed, and measured. Thus Mangria was born.

  Simple. Funny. Concise. Rejected. We received the following response from the ATF.

  You may not make statements on your label that may create the impression that your wine contains distilled spirits, is comparable to a distilled spirit, or has intoxicating qualities. “Liquor” must be deleted from your label.

  So we reluctantly changed “liquor cabinet” to “booze cabinet.” This was also rejected. I wanted to argue the
point, because how does the average label reader know what is in my cabinet? I could use it for storing sex toys, for all they know. But there is no appeals process. It’s a fresh submission every time. Eventually I just wanted to get it shipped and said fuck it, no back story on the label. But there is no going back. If we shipped even one bottle with that version, it would be our label for every bottle thereafter. So we had to figure it out.

  Just so you understand the level of stupidity we were dealing with, they also had a beef with the words “alcoholic” and “ex-con,” but we beat them on a technicality by resubmitting it with a thicker line crossing the words out.

  About a week later we resubmitted, for a third time, with the following change: “I went to the fridge, the pantry, and the basement lab, poured, mixed . . .” This time it was approved. Much better. Good job, government. Millions of lives saved.

  In a few months, we were trying to release the Mangria white peach and pear flavor for the ladies. So we needed a new label. And when I say “new,” I just mean the old label in a different color. But that still had to meet the approval of The Man again.

  This time we wanted to add the fact that the product is gluten-free. So the label we turned in read “100% Gluten-Free.” The TTB of the ATF came back saying we could not say it was “100% Gluten-Free,” just that it was “Gluten-Free.” As if there’s a fucking difference. Here’s where it gets comical. We were also working on getting the mango flavor to market and were approved to label that one “100% Gluten-Free” no problem.

  Other than that gluten change and the color scheme, we had submitted the exact same label as the original Mangria. But the ATF decided that this label just wouldn’t do now. Yes, the same one they previously approved. We had just given them the old label to try and skip one do-si-do of the retard square dance. The same label that appeared on forty thousand units that had already sold and been consumed, sporting a label approved by the ATF. Seemed like a no-brainer. Except we forgot they are the ones with no brains. How dare we apply logic to the situation?

  With that in mind, I decided, Fuck them, I’m creative. I’ll just write a new label. It follows . . .

  At last the swarthy Latin lover that is Adam Carolla’s Mangria has found his soul mate—a sweet, fair-haired peach of a señorita with a great pear. But watch out, boys, this blonde bombshell packs a punch.

  Well, you guessed it. We were rejected. The problem this time was the phrase “packs a punch.” The issue? It “implies strength.” We were told we could not state that it “has intoxicating qualities.” I wanted to argue that yes, “packs a punch” could mean high alcohol content, or could mean zesty flavor. But I knew that would fall on dick ears.

  And what the fuck? We can’t mention intoxication on our wine bottle?! That’s why people are buying it. Shouldn’t it be illegal to not warn people that the product is strong? If the label said “Goes down smooth. Will not get you drunk at all,” I’d certainly be sued when someone chugged it and drove into an empty swimming pool. In a world full of permanent stickers on my sun visor about proper airbag use (as if I have a choice in that matter) and pictures of diseased lungs on cigarette packs, the idea that we are forbidden by the ATF from stating that our alcoholic product can get you drunk is absurd and barely fathomable. Typical wine comes in at 14 to 15 percent alcohol; sangria, which is stepped on with fruit juice, contains about 9 to10 percent. Mangria is 21 percent. We are being negligent if we allow people to think it has the same alcohol content as regular wine or sangria.

  We threw up our hands and just removed the last line. That’s the sad part. We just gave up. I feel like we’re a bunch of astronauts who crash-landed on Planet Retard and we have to adhere to their laws or the Retardians will kill our children. Seriously. What country are we living in? What about freedom of speech? What about my rights as an artist? I can’t write a joke on the back of my bottle of extra-powerful wine explaining that it is extra-powerful wine, but Piss Christ sits proudly in a museum in New York?

  The thing that really steams my bean is that I work my ass off shilling my invention around the country, but the guy who reaps the rewards is Uncle Sam. The government makes more money on this product than me or the manufacturers. The man just collects taxes all along the way—from me, from the manufacturer, from the UPS guy who delivers it to the distributors, the gas station that filled that UPS truck, and the store that sells it to you booze hounds. He’s just making money every fucking inch of the way and contributing none of the work. Every time it comes off the assembly line: k’ching. Every time it gets shipped: k’ching. Every time it gets poured: k’ching. All they do is say no and they still get thirty-five cents to every dollar we make.

  They don’t give a shit. They can give us completely contradictory information or tell us to talk to the hand and there ain’t shit we can do about it. This is a monopoly. When there’s only one cable company in town, they give you an eight-hour window for when they’re going to come out. Government is a monopoly too. It’s not like I can go to a different mom-and-pop ATF to get my wine label approved.

  This is going to make me go wacko like Waco. I’m this close to filling a U-Haul with fertilizer, going to the back of Mount Rushmore, and driving it up George Washington’s ass.

  That said, I do have new regulations for businesses big and small. Not because I want more bureaucracy, I just have great ideas. If you’ll all just listen to me, I can assure you we will get our economy back on top.

  BETTER GOODS FOR A BETTER AMERICA

  SOCKS: The sock manufacturers are some of the laziest on the planet. I recently sent my old lady to Target to grab me some new ones. She came back with the chub pack, in size six to twelve. What the fuck? Shoes come in half sizes. There are twelve sizes of shoes that would fit in that sock range. I don’t think Brad Garrett and E from Entourage should have the same sock size. What if this were online dating? “Our gals come in somewhere between 110 and 190 pounds. Don’t worry about it—we’ll just send one over.”

  A related footwear complaint is the dress sock. They’re too thin. They’re as sheer as panty hose. When I put those on I feel like I’m John Lithgow in The World According to Garp. And they’re always way too long and never wide enough. They’re three feet long, but an inch and a half wide. It takes an hour of straining to thread your foot through those things. And if you ever catch a glimpse of yourself in just dress socks and underwear, I don’t care if you’re built like Herschel Walker, you look gay.

  OUTLET MALLS: I’m going to create and enforce new laws for the people who live near outlet malls. Outlet malls are always in the middle of nowhere. You should have to drive at least forty-five miles to get that discount. If you live near one, we’re going to need to put you into the outlet-mall exchange program. In order to purchase some irregular slacks you must undertake a pilgrimage. I want you to spend a lot of time in the car considering why you’re so fucking cheap.

  STORES THAT STAY OPEN AGAINST ALL ODDS: There is a store on Ventura Boulevard in L.A. that’s called something like “Candles ’N Such.” I always see places like that and think, “How do they stay open?” Your business plan is that once a month someone comes in and buys an eight-dollar sand candle? There’s never anybody in the place. I’m getting rid of these stores. They are doing nothing for our economy. I’m sure it’s just a bunch of rich husbands underwriting them anyway. This is the wife of the executive getting out of the house and having a three-hour lunch with her girlfriends and calling it a business expense. Maybe I’m just envious. I wish my day were showing up at noon, eating lunch, and then closing up at three. That might be my plan for after I finish this president gig. I’ll find a rich husband to underwrite my business, then make sure it’s a store no one would ever go into. I’d call it “Adolf’s Herpes and Bear Traps Emporium.”

  MEDICINE FOR CHILDREN: We’ve gone nuts with the childproofing. I spent twenty minutes trying to open some multivitamins recently because of the childproof cap. Don’t we want kids to eat vitamins? Why
are we making them impossible to open? You can’t get kids to take vitamins unless you flavor them like grape soda and shape them like Fred Flintstone anyway, so why do we think they’re going to start popping my multivitamins like Skittles? I’m an adult and I can barely stomach these things; they get stuck in my throat, one out of every ten makes my stomach cramp, and they all make my piss stink. It’s not like any kid has ever OD’d on zinc. “How’d Timmy die? Childhood leukemia?” “No. Too much niacin.”

  Even worse is children’s aspirin. It’s made for children. But if one of my kids gets a headache or a fever, I have to take the bottle down to the garage, put it in the bench vise, and go at it with some channel locks to get the cap off. Ironically, the children’s aspirin and the multivitamin are actually good for kids, but are harder to get into than MIT.

  Why are we crazily overcautious in some areas but don’t seem to give a shit with stuff that’s more dangerous? Think about the electric knife you use on Thanksgiving to carve the turkey. It just has an on-off switch. There’s no code you have to enter, no combination lock, no safety. You can take this electric stabbing machine with a thirteen-inch serrated blade and just switch it on. You could turn the switch on before you put it away and then next year when you plugged it in, it would immediately kick on. A kid gets ahold of that, he’s going to turn the kitchen into a Saw movie. Yet if he took that same electric knife and held it to the childproof top on his vitamins, the motor would burn out before he got it open.

  DISH SOAP: You always see the ads about how the store brand will only clean this many dishes, but with superconcentrated Dawn one drop will clean all the dishes from the Caesars Palace buffet for a year. Which sounds great except for the fact that the next six cups of coffee taste like you opened your mouth going through a car wash. We need some rules about dish soap. It’s too concentrated. You rinse the coffee mug once, twice, three times, and it’s still foaming. I had to switch soap because what we were using was too soapy. You guys are doing too good a job. Take a week off.