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Joe Biden And The Tooth Fairy
Why bedtime stories are a poor guide for life
“Mommy, tell me a story before I go to sleep?”
“OK, dear one. What would you like to hear tonight?”
“Tell me the one about Joe Biden and the Tooth Fairy.”
“That’s your favorite, isn’t it? Do you remember how it starts?”
“Once upon a time there was a wise old man called Joe Biden…”
“That’s right. Once upon a time there was a wise old man called Joe Biden. Of course, he wasn’t really wise but he certainly was old. He’d been a politician all his life, which meant he was very good at smiling at people and talking slow, using simple words the people could understand. Joe talked a lot, in fact more than most people wanted, but he always kept smiling.”
“Tell the part about the mental dwarf.”
“In the White Castle lived an orange mental dwarf. He was so unhappy that he was always grumpy, and he was so mindless that everything he said was simultaneously a lie and mostly incomprehensible. Some people said he was the stupidest person who’d ever lived, but then other people pointed out that forty-three million US citizens had voted for the mental dwarf, which made those voters even more stupid than the mental dwarf. At this point, smart people would…
