"So, as far as I can tell, judging from the psychological data, we have only one real risk to America from his marital history if Newt Gingrich were to become president: We would need to worry that another nation, perhaps a little younger than ours, would be so taken by Mr. Gingrich that it would seduce him into marrying it and becoming its president." ~ Dr. Keith Ablow, Fox News' "Medical A-Team"
Bom Dia Meu Amor,
I did not see it coming. I was doing so well on my own. The seventh-largest economy in the world but projected to rise to fifth in the next decade, my envious climate, vast natural resources and surging exports in everything from orange juice and ethanol to aircraft and supermodels, I did not need anyone else.
At least that is what I kept telling myself.
President Gingrich, as soon as Air Force One touched down on my hot, tropical tarmac I shuddered. I knew that I was lost, lost, lost. As the gleaming jet's door opened and you stood there on the top of the stairs, your ermine robe jauntily draped over your adorably hunched soft shoulders (how deliciously bold of you to institute a glorious new tradition a week into your presidency!), I suddenly knew what the economic dynamo of South America was desperately missing. I suddenly knew who would complete me ever since becoming a bicameral presidential republic in 1889.
You, Newt. You.
I realize that you are taken by another and you love her very much but please! She is old and let's face it, sickly, while I am young, passionate and sporty. Leave her!
***
你好我的愛,
I was so ready to hate you. "Dramatically raise the pain level for the Chinese cheating," you said as a candidate. You made me so mad! I could barely watch you in the hundreds and hundreds of hours of Lincoln-Douglas-style debates you insisted upon. He's so old! So mean! I am only sixty-one, you are sixty-seven! There is absolutely, positively no way that I would ever be attracted to a president like that.
Besides, I was still recovering from a short, ill-advised indiscretion with Ambassador Huntsman.
And then that damn G8+5 meeting! Wherever you went it was as if you were followed by a glowing light (and I'm not referring to the glowing light that you make an aide shine on you from three steps back whenever you appear in public). I mean an inner glow of, how else should I put it? Raw masculine energy. Whenever you were near I couldn't think, I couldn't breathe. You kept paying attention to me, kept listening to me. I never would've thought you'd be a good listener. Then I'd snap out of it and tell myself, "C'mon, if you didn't own $1.2 trillion in T-bills, 8% of United States debt, he wouldn't give you the time of day." So away from you I would steel myself, resolve to keep my distance, but then there you were at the group photo and Brazil was all over you like a cheap suit and my blood just boiled!
Come. We belong together.
***
Alii Ungibung!
I thought, what chance have I got with a magnificent presence such as yourself, "The most powerful man on the planet," (as you had engraved on the White House official state dinner service). It never even occurred to me, and I'm sure not to you either, that such a beautiful, historic romance would even be possible.
Remember when we first met you didn't even know I was a country? You were over by the chocolate fountain in the UN Delegates Dining Room berating the kitchen staff on the quality of the banana slices, how they were too mushy to remain affixed to the skewers' tines. The trembling worker looked vaguely like a fellow Pacific Islander so I felt compelled to intervene.
"Palau, I thought you were still a United Nation's Trusteeship," you chortled and your entire entourage laughed like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard in their life, especially your then UN Ambassador Cain who eyed me like a piece of meat. -- or a piece of meat on a piece of pizza.
Remember how I fought back tears of shame, straightened my spine and told you, "We have a Compact of Free Association with Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, thank you, and have been a sovereign republic since 1994."
The look on your face made me weak in the knees. The stern and virtually omnipotent, "leader of the free world," (as you have tattooed on inner thigh. I'll never tell. I swear!) suddenly revealed himself as the sweet little misunderstood boy that I have come to love and have rule over me as my new president.
Let the outside world howl. They howled at the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson, at Brad and Angie. Haters hate nothing more than a president and his nation in love.
And no, I won't allow you to take a "fact-finding" trip to China and Brazil. Our nation may be tiny but there's work to do.