Humor and what-ifs

There’s a nice piece by James Traub in last Sunday’s NYT Magazine. In it, Traub describes a conversation he had with Al Gore in the course of writing a story about him for the magazine. Check out all of the erudite references therein:

Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow. We had moved on to complexity theory, which Gore would really immerse himself in if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner.

Now go back and re-read that paragraph, except substitute the words “President Bush” for “Gore”, and read it out loud, and see if you can get to the end of the paragraph without bursting into laughter.

Alas, wherefore not Gore-Obama ’08?