At Long Last, a Candidate to Call Your Own

Presidents Day is a time to look back with pride at the greats: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln. Unfortunately, many of our recent presidents have been dolts in one way or another, with Watergate, Irangate and Monicagate, and this elections’ crop of contenders may not be any better.

National Lampoon’s Web site (https://www.nationallampoon.com) is giving voters the opportunity to craft their own virtual candidates, by choosing from a list of tongue-in-cheek body parts (Marv Albert hair and a Michael Jackson nose, for example), campaign platforms, personal histories and closeted skeletons.

“In the late 1960s, I remember Mad magazine had Alfred E. Neuman run for president, and then there was Pat Paulsen from ‘Laugh-In,’ so I thought it made sense, now that we are living in this Internet world, to let the citizens of America create a candidate,” said Nationallampoon.com editor Scott Rubin.

Unfortunately, the site does not give visitors the opportunity to choose the gender of the candidate. It seems National Lampoon’s Harvard-educated chauvinist geeks believe the only presidential candidates, virtual or otherwise, should be men. We’ll let it slide this time. . . . Why should we expect the virtual world to be any less sexist than the real world?

Candidate “building” continues on the site until April, when an amalgamated candidate, created from users’ most popular choices, will be posted.

So far, Rubin said, visitors to the site like a candidate named Dirk Lipshitz, who would legalize drugs and have an affair with a White House gardener named Phillipe.

Nationallampoon.com’s candidate will run a pseudo-traditional campaign, complete with memorabilia and a whistle-stop tour. In Rubin’s marketing dreams, his virtual candidate would even debate the flesh-and-blood candidates. . . . (Insert Al Gore joke here.)

I would like to suggest taking things further . . . why not elect a virtual president. Travel expenses would be nil, because a virtual president could communicate with foreign heads of state via modem, and Secret Service protection wouldn’t be necessary (although a nasty computer virus could wreak havoc on the computer-in-chief).

But best of all, a virtual president would be scandal-free: There would be no doubt about whether he inhaled or had sex, and maybe the word “gate” would, at long last, disappear from the political lexicon.

Viva President Dot Com!

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McDonald’s recently announced it is using four Orange County restaurants to test a program allowing toll-road drivers to pay for their meals electronically.

O.C. commuters, who presumably live in their cars, will be able to use dashboard-mounted tollway transponders, operated by radio frequency, to charge food purchased at McDonald’s drive-thru windows.

The program will be tested for 60 days at restaurants in Costa Mesa, Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita.

Sounds good, but what I really need is a transponder on my dashboard--no, make that on my forehead--that prohibits me from buying fast food.

Booth Moore can be reached at booth.moore@latimes.com.