The Five Presidents You Meet in Purgatory

Sometime in the future, five of the most reviled American Presidents of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries meet in Purgatory, a temporary state of grace in the afterlife where they have to expiate their sins. Alas, they're having a tough time of it. This quarrelsome quintet consists of Warren G. Harding, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, William Jefferson Clinton, and George W. Bush.

Clinton: Man, is it hot or what?

Bush: Cool off, Bubba. There's no skirts here.

Clinton: Can't even cling onto Hillary's anymore. Ha, ha, ha... Hey, Dickie, you stole my tv. You watchin' "Bonanza" again?

Nixon: I am not a crook.

Bush: I don't do tv anymore. I just read books. Finished "Huckleberry Finn." You should see the one Mark Twain's writin' now.

Clinton: I don't blame you for retreatin' into the past, Dickie. Especially after Watergate, Vietnam, and bein' thrown outta office.

Nixon: At least I wasn't impeached.

Clinton: You woulda been if you'd stayed. You lost, Dickie. Heck, you didn't even put up a fight. I fought the almighty Republicans and won. I left office with a 65-percent approval ratin' after the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history. You had about 30 percent plus stagflation.

Nixon: I went to China, landed a man on the moon, and ended the Vietnam War, which Johnnie over here screwed up. [Expletive deleted].

Johnson: Listen you damned Yankee, Bubba's right. I fought, you ran. All I needed were a coupla hundred thousand more troops. Then I woulda whupped those skinny little Commies easy. But Congress and the press kept giving me grief.

Bush: I had the same problem with my big surge in Iraq.

Johnson: Big surge? I've had bigger pimples on my ass. You put an extra 30,000 soldiers into Baghdad. I had over half a million in Vietnam, and it still wasn't enough.

Clinton: When you fight, you fight to win.

Bush: That's easy for you to say, Bubba. While you were puffin' weed, I was flyin' military aircraft.

Clinton: Your daddy got you that cushy job, Georgie. You never even went overseas. As for the pot, you know I never inhaled.

Bush: The only hardware you ever fired was that cannon attached to your lower abdomen.

Nixon [flashing double-"V" sign]: There's no doubt about it.

Harding: Gentlemen, I am deeply offended by the subject matter of this conversation.

Bush: Tell 'em, Warren. Tell 'em. You're not like these bad men!

Clinton [wagging his finger]: You are such a hypocrite, Warren. You do your little conservative hit job and make the rest of us look like choirboys. You had two extramarital affairs-

Harding: I lack sufficient fingers and toes to count yours.

Clinton: And you had a child out of wedlock.

Harding: Those charges were never substantiated. And I had no knowledge of the Teapot Dome oil scandal until I was almost out of office.

Nixon: There's no doubt about it.

Clinton: You got it, fellas. Deny, deny, deny...But why were you always so introverted, Dickie? I always liked people.

Nixon: I always hated the Kennedys, especially JFK.

Johnson: Let me tell you something about JFK. I didn't like him either. He was a snooty Boston Brahmin who never wanted to get himself dirty. I never trusted anyone who didn't have some cow manure on his boots. But I still admired the kid. He got Krushkev's missiles outta Cuba, and, bad back and all, he still had plenty of energy for the ladies.

Nixon: [Expletive deleted].

Johnson: JFK must have had quite a constitution.

Nixon: I don't give a [expletive deleted] about the Constitution.

Clinton: JFK was my hero. If I had a cannon, he had an ICBM.

Bush: Forget about ICBMs, I had to deal with new-kee-ler terrorists.

Clinton: You've gotta read up on elocution, Georgie. The word is "new-klee-er."

Bush: I'm so misunderestimated.

Johnson: On Friday afternoons, JFK would pass champagne to topless secretaries in the White House pool. Now that boy knew how to party.

Bush: You guys are such lechers. I was always faithful to Laura. I was a man of faith.

Clinton: I was religious, too. Whenever I'd have an intern in the Oval Office, the first words outta my mouth were "Oh my God!"

Bush: You're goin' to hell, Bubba.

Clinton: And you've been hangin' too much with Evangelicals.

Harding: In my day, there would be a law against this behavior of speech. Indecency is a vice not to be in hand.

Bush: And people said I was inarticulate! This guy makes me sound like Abraham Lincoln.

Clinton: Nobody's heard you in centuries, Georgie.

Bush: How can that be? I just got here.

Nixon: Centuries can seem like seconds. It's in the Book of Genesis. God created the heavens and the Earth in six days, but a day for Him might be millions of years for us.

Bush: You are deep, Dickie! Where d'ja get that one?

Nixon: Haven't you ever seen "Inherit The Wind"?

Bush: No, I've been too busy readin'.

Johnson: Reading might make you smarter, but it won't get you into heaven.

Clinton: Yeah, but it keeps hope alive.

Johnson: Guess who's coming to dinner.

Clinton: Hillary?

Johnson: No, a guy named Rudy. He said he's serving something.

Clinton and Nixon: [Expletives deleted].