“We Demand a Vapid, Con­de­scend­ing, Mean­ing­less, Polit­i­cally Safe Response to This Peti­tion.”.

Rea­son has cast a gim­let eye on the White House’s “We
the Peo­ple” peti­tion site before. (See Peter Suderman’s “5,000
Sig­na­tures Will Get You a Response From White House Pol­icy Wonks,
Unless Your Idea is “Bad” or About Weed”) But some enter­pris­ing
cit­i­zens have take the enter­prise of ques­tion­ing the enter­prise
even fur­ther, sub­mit­ting this
peti­tion on the site:

We demand a vapid, con­de­scend­ing, mean­ing­less,
polit­i­cally safe response to this petition.

Since these peti­tions are ignored apart from an occa­sional
patron­iz­ing and inane polit­i­cal state­ment amount­ing to noth­ing more
than a con­de­scend­ing pat on the head, we the sign­ers would enjoy
hav­ing the illu­sion of suc­cess. Since no other out­come to this
process seems pos­si­ble, we demand that the White House imme­di­ately
assign a junior staffer to com­pose a tame and vapid response to
this peti­tion, and never attempt to take any mean­ing­ful action on
this or any other issue. We would also like a cookie.

After being hit with ques­tions about UFOs and legal­iz­ing weed,
the White House has raised the thresh­old for a guar­an­teed response
to
25,000 e-signatures in 30 days. To date, the peti­tion has
9,228. (Thanks in part to get­ting some
media cov­er­age yes­ter­day.) Go to town, commenters.

Via Jerry Brito’s Google+ feed, where he describes the peti­tion
as “fatal­is­tic and cyn­i­cal.” I agree. And I would also like a
cookie.

[Hit and Run]

Com­ple­ment­ing the hon­est cam­paign ad, here’s the only real­is­tic peti­tion I’ve ever seen.

There’s a video on YouTube of the only hon­est cam­paign adver­tise­ment I’ve ever seen.