If you’re like me, when you hear the words “Social Security,” you think of the television show Cops — specifically, you think of a 325-pound, one-shod, pockmarked Warrant fan decked out in a stained mesh midriff top and spandex, her mullet specked with gravel as she rolls around on the concrete shrieking that she’s JUST HOLDING IT FOR SOMEONE ELSE WAAARGH! “What do you do for a living, Ma’am?” asks the officer ‘twixt the heaving breaths necessary to restrain a meth-addled behemoth, who herself strings together enough belabored yowls to approximate the words “I’m disabled, I get Social Security.” But what you might not know is that Social Security is not just something that buys OxyContin for domestic abusers and the partners who love them. It’s true! It turns out that Social Security is for old people. Like, people even older than me. I’ll let you mull that one over.

Now, according to our President — who recently won re-election on a platform of gay-bashing and fear-mongering, tempered only by his promises not to privatize Social Security — it turns out that the Social Security system as it currently stands must be privatized immediately because it is in serious, serious trouble. Like if Social Security were a schoolboy, it would be getting its name written on the board with two check marks by it, and staying in from recess, and getting a nasty note sent home to its mother, a note saying:

Dear Mrs. Security:

Your son Social is in serious trouble because he was invented by a total pinko in the 1930s, and not because I personally gutted him to fight a bunch of wars and pay off syndicated conservative pundit Armstrong Williams. I hope you never get old like me, unless, like me, you are flush with cashola you gutted from Social Security and gave directly to your former company in a no-bid—What? Yes, fine, sure, that Members Only jacket will be perfect for Auschwitz. Whatever.

Dick Cheney.

P.S. Spent your whole life working and putting money away for your retirement? Ha, fuck you.

That’s some pretty serious trouble! And it turns out the only way to fix this trouble is privatization, because after all, the answer for everything is in a free market. Just ask the Vietnamese three-year-old who made my shoes!

Ooh, I know what you’re saying. I must be some sort of socialist, right? Yanking away Paris Hilton’s hard-earned money just so some no-good, lazy, descended-from-immigrants 89-year-old bum can get an abortion every week? If I weren’t such a freedom-hating Osama-lover, I would just embrace the power of unregulated commerce and respect the fact that Americans want to “keep more of their own money.” If I didn’t spend every night simultaneously worshipping an effigy of Satan and a giant portrait of Chairman Mao, I’d know that the best way for Americans to keep their own money is to “invest” it in their “choice” of “personal accounts” hand-picked by the White House, which judging by the President’s abysmal business record would mean they’d most “likely” end up “totally barren” — just like my “evil socialist womb.”

Call me a Red menace for having the gall to suggest that the Social Security money that gets chiseled away from my already-meager paycheck be safely kept until I’m old, and not crapped away on the fiduciary-world equivalent of a slot machine. Call me a French-sympathizing friend of tyranny for hoping that I may someday be able to afford a nursing bra for my pregnant 15-year-old granddaughter who signed an “abstinence pledge” in fifth grade, only knows about Roe v. Wade from banned history books and thinks condoms cause cancer. Call me whatever you want; just don’t call me on the phone, because I’m pretty sure Alberto Gonzales has bugged it by now.