“Playing darts is fun!” President Bush threw another dart out the window.
“Shouldn’t we have a dart board?” Dick Cheney asked.
“Only if you’re a stickler for playing by the official rules.” Bush threw a dart at a potted plant.
“AIEEE! A shiny man!”
An aide ran into the office. “There’s a crisis in the Middle East! You need to take this phone call!”
“No,” Bush responded. “If you check the schedule, right now is dart time. You’ll have schedule that in for later or it won’t be fair to the darts.”
“But–”
“I said later!” Bush threw a dart at the aide who scurried off.
There was a flash of light and then a strange craft appeared in the middle of the Oval Office. Out of it emerged a man in metallic clothes. “I come from the future to warn you of–”
“AIEEE! A shiny man!” Bush exclaimed. He then pulled out a gun and shot the man dead.
“You idiot; that was a man from the future,” Cheney said.
“How do you know?”
“It’s a well known fact that people from the future wear shiny clothing. He was probably here to warn us of an impending disaster.”
Bush hung his head. “Well, I feel stupid.” He looked back up. “Anyway, we have a time machine; let’s kill Hitler!”
“Sure; why not. I’m not doing anything this afternoon.”
Bush and Cheney waited near a house in 1905 Austria. “Should Hitler be here?” Cheney asked.
“He should be here or I’m going to need to correct his article on Wikipedia,” Bush replied.
A teenager came out of the house. “Kill him!” Bush shouted an opened fire. “Pepper his face, Dick!”
“Die!” Cheney yelled as he fired his shotgun.
“Mein Leben!” Hitler yelled as he was ripped apart by bullets.
“Yay!” Bush exclaimed. “We killed teenage Hitler!”
“That was Hitler? I was just shooting him because he was a teenager.”
Bush checked his watch. “Killing Hitler was tons of fun, but it’s about lunchtime in one hundred and three years. We better get back.”
With a flash, the time machine appeared back in the Oval Office. “So, can killing people in the past have unintended consequences in the future?” Bush asked Cheney.
“No. That only happens when you kill butterflies.”
There was shouting from outside the White House. “Oh no; protesters!” Bush went to window to look. One was holding up a sign that said, “Bush = Van Houtte.”
“Who is Van Houtte?” Bush asked.
One of Bush’s aides walked into the Oval Office. “Jean Van Houtte was a Belgium Prime Minister in the 1950’s. He had a very tepid response to their recession, and thus is widely considered the worst politician of the past one hundred years. It’s not very flattering to be compared to him… though I think to compare anyone you don’t like to him is to belittle the travesty of how mediocre his reaction was to that financial near-crisis.”
“You hear that, Dick?” Bush exclaimed, “We’ve changed the future so people don’t even know of genocidal dictators.”
“Yes, the world has been very peaceful for some time,” the aide said. “It all started about the time some teenager was brutally murdered in Austria after the turn of the last century. Anyway, you have to get ready for your speech at the World Trade Center which still exists.”
“Woo hoo!” Bush turned to Cheney. “We’re time traveling heroes!”
“Whatever,” Cheney said. “Let’s go back in time and kill more people.”
There were screams outside. Bush looked out the window to see the protesters being torn apart by fifty foot tall gorillas with robot parts. “Uh… what are they?”
“Those are the cybernetically enhanced gorillas that really rule the planet,” the aide explained. “When they saw humanity was weak from not being involved in any large wars, they decided to take over.”
“Oh no!” Bush turned to Cheney. “We’ve changed the future for the worse by killing Hitler!”
Cheney shrugged. “How do you know it’s worse? We’re only seeing one side of the cyborg gorillas.”
“You’re right.” Bush looked at his aide. “So, what is the general opinion on them?”
“People never seem to complain about them,” he said. “Then again, if you complain, they eat you.”
“So its hard to tell, then.” Bush thought for a moment. “Well, best not to overreact and go off unkilling Hitler willy-nilly. So, do I have time to watch CSI: Miami off of the DVR before we go to New York? It should have recorded last night, and I really want to find out if Horatio says something mysterious while putting on his sunglasses.”
The aide looked at Bush like he was insane. “What are you talking about?”
“CSI: Miami. It comes on Monday nights.”
“No. It comes on Friday nights. It’s always aired on Friday nights.”
“But that’s a horrible time slot for it!” Bush turned to Cheney and grabbed him by his suit coat. “We’ve caused a dystopian future! We have to go back and stop ourselves from killing Hitler!”
“That sounds boring. Want to go fishing instead?”
Bush paused for a second. “Yeah. Let’s go fishing.”
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