Questions appropriated from a White House interview with George W. Bush by unknown interviewers, transcribed by the White House, May 13, 2008.

Answers - circa 2011

QUESTION: Good morning, Mr. President.

SARAH: “Mr. President”! That is a good one.

QUESTION: Thank you for having us into this amazing place.

SARAH: I’m in Riverside…

QUESTION: Congratulations, father of the bride.

SARAH: I am neither a father, nor the parent of a bride….

QUESTION: When you took her arm, Mr. President, what were you thinking?

SARAH: When I took her arm—if I took a daughter’s arm when she was getting married… I guess this means I would be giving her away—I would probably think about how stupid and backwards that concept is. The giving away of a daughter…

QUESTION: A sunset.

SARAH: If there was a sunset? No, that wouldn’t change the way I felt.

QUESTION: Ninety-two degrees?

SARAH: Nope. That neither.

QUESTION: Mr. President, what was your toast?

SARAH: I’m working on my toasts. I’ve spent a good deal of my life thinking that I was scared of public speaking, but I’m starting to really enjoy it, so I think the next toast I do, whenever that will be, will be great. I’ll enjoy it, at least. I don’t know about anyone else.

QUESTION: Mr. President, we understand you had a little homework assignment, you watched Steve Martin’s “Father of the Bride.”

SARAH: Oh my god, really? That was president Bush’s “homework assignment?” From his daughter?

QUESTION: Did you pick up any tips there?

SARAH: I’ll bet he didn’t. In one ear… I can see him watching it though. I bet he laughed.

QUESTION: Mr. President, the one thing we don’t see in here is a computer, and we know that you went cold turkey off email for security reasons. What are you looking forward to when you finally get your computer back?

SARAH: That’s funny. They took away his computer…. And what a loaded question. I could easily make a dumb joke about porn here.

QUESTION: Mr. President, we know you’re a man of intense faith. And I wonder, what was a moment in this room over the past eight years when you needed that most?

SARAH: OK, back to the interview appropriation. (I’ll stop simply gawking at the inanity of these questions posed to the man who is supposed to be, or was, that is, in charge of our country.) Well! Actually, I am not a man of intense faith. And I am not a woman of intense faith either. And I’ve only had access to the room that I am in now for five and a half months—not eight years. But I would say that I did need some faith something bad last October when I was struck with the worst case of eczema I’ve ever experienced, alone, here in Riverside, and it was three in the morning and I was driving to an all-night CVS to buy Gold Bond medicated cream and $100 worth of other treatments. That was tough.

QUESTION: Consequential. That’s what you want —

SARAH: It was the consequence of changing my life entirely in the span of ten days. I just needed a little more of a decompression chamber—or its mirror equivalent, I suppose—whatever chamber there would be to get you from two months of total vacation relaxation to extreme intellectual rigor.

QUESTION: This is the last question, Mr. President. You talked about some tough decisions—what was the happiest moment you’ve had in this amazing room?

SARAH: Writing. Writing is magical.

QUESTION: Do you think the first President Bush is proud of you?

SARAH: Probably not.

QUESTION: You know the feeling.

SARAH: I doubt I know many of the feelings that Bush senior has had.

QUESTION: Mr. President, thank you for sharing the people’s house with us.

(Interview moves to Roosevelt Room)

SARAH: OK, here we are in the “Roosevelt Room.” I feel like I should take my laptop into the kitchen or bathroom or something.

QUESTION: Mr. President, thank you very much for having us into the Roosevelt Room for the first online interview. In the spirit of the Internet, I wonder if we could ask a question from one of our users, Steve Bailey, of New York, who says: With oil at $126 a barrel, pushing up the price of everything—even food—what can your administration do to help people right now?

SARAH: I thought Bush wasn’t allowed online.

QUESTION: Mr. President, as you know, as a possible solution, Senator McCain, Senator Clinton have talked about suspending the federal gasoline tax this summer. You never said an absolute “no” to that. Is it something you would consider or do you think it’s a bad idea to consider?

SARAH: No way. Tax gas.

QUESTION: Mr. President, I wonder if in your eight years in office what the changes have been, in your view, of climate change?

SARAH: If Bush hadn’t become president, Al Gore probably wouldn’t have had time to make his movie with Davis Guggenheim. So, in effect, the changes, at least in terms of recognition of the problem, were positive.

QUESTION: Mr. President, for the record, is global warming real?

SARAH: I wonder how he answered that. I also wonder if the interviewer thought he had some inside, Hegelian-style dope. Yes. Real.

QUESTION: Mr. President, acknowledging those constraints, you’re an oil man—some people say that climate change, global warming could have been your Nixon-to-China. Do you wish you’d done more?

SARAH: The extent of my oil-ness is that I am dedicated to moisturizer. I always moisturize my face, legs and arms anytime after I shower. I also drive a car that uses gas.

QUESTION: Mr. President, turning to the biggest issue of all, Iraq. I wonder if you—various people and various candidates talk about pulling out next year. If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what’s the worst that could happen, what’s the doomsday scenario?

SARAH: Even putting “doomsday” in that sentence is begging the question that getting out of Iraq means some sort of doomsday and furthers the us/them mentality. Why don’t you ask what is the best way, and how one could go about getting out of Iraq, as a positive endeavor in U.S. foreign policy?

QUESTION: Mr. President, I’m going to surprise you—there’s a question from a user, Bruce Becker, and he asks: Do you feel that you were misled [sic] on Iraq?

SARAH: I wasn’t, but I think president Bush was. He was mislead by himself and others.

QUESTION: And so you feel that you didn’t have all the information you should have or the right spin on that information?

SARAH: The right spin? That’s a dark question. I, myself, had about as much legitimate information as my cat. I sensed that getting into Iraq was the wrong thing to do. It was too close to September 11, and I know the two events had somehow become conflated and were feeding each other in very dangerous ways.

QUESTION: Mr. President, you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?

SARAH: I have been meaning to go golfing! No connection to Iraq, however.

QUESTION: Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?

SARAH: I decided that I should go golfing because, when I’m not in Riverside, I live in Venice, CA, very close to a public golf course. I thought I should take advantage of that. Come to think of it, I live very close to a public course here in Riverside as well. I hadn’t thought of that…

QUESTION: Mr. President, you’re headed later today to the Middle East. The prospects for brokering peace between Israelis and Palestinians look bleak. I wonder what the best is you can hope for, and why should Americans back home care about your efforts over there?

SARAH: This is a topic of which that I wish I had a better understanding. I’m not in fact going to the Middle East later today, but if I was at least I might get a sense of what is going on first hand. It’s an issue that I would wish entropy on—in the sense that all chaos is non-self perpetuating and will reach some form of homeostasis at some point. I’m not religious, however. Perhaps entropy is not applicable to religion.

QUESTION: Mr. President, I know you’re going to hate this, but I’m hoping that we may twist your arm and talk about baseball for just a moment. (Laughter.) Mr. President, you’re a Major League Baseball team owner again. Everyone is a free agent. You have a Yankees-like wallet. Who is your first position player? Who’s your pitcher?

SARAH: Baseball team? Wow. I don’t know. You know, I’m just not that into baseball. If I had a team I would support—maybe—a ski team. I like the solitariness of skiers. They seem to embody a kind of self-reflection coupled with physical understanding that I like.

QUESTION: We thought you were going to go A-Rod, Josh Beckett.

SARAH: I’m not sure I know who those people are. I’ve heard of “A-rod.”

QUESTION: Now, Mr. President, I wonder if you think that Major League Baseball is doing enough to combat steroids use, and specifically, would you favor a blood test to check for human growth hormone. As you know the players union says it’s an unwarranted—

SARAH: I don’t condone mandatory drug testing. I do not condone drug use in professional sports, either, however. Innocent until proven guilty, I think.

QUESTION: But what would that take?

SARAH: I think those that are close to the games will know when one of their peers is doing drugs. I know when the lady in front of me in line at the gourmet foods shop is doing drugs. It’s not hard to recognize. In those situations, you have to sit the person down and have a serious talk—not at the gourmet store, but at the game…

QUESTION: And there haven’t been enough normal-sized people.

SARAH: That’s so funny! But not true. I think there are too many “normal”-sized people. And I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I’m kidding.

QUESTION: Now, Mr. President, you and the First Lady appeared on American Idol’s charity show, “Idol Gives Back.” And I wonder who do you think is going to win? Syesha, David Cook, or David Archuleta?

SARAH: Oh, good lord. I think that show is the scourge of our civilization. The one good thing about it is that it has the potential to inspire people to sing and dance without feeling like they are doing something strange with their bodies.

QUESTION: All right. Mr. President, who does the better impression, Will Ferrell of you, or Dana Carvey of your father?

SARAH: Definitely Will Ferrell. Oh, wait—neither of them does impressions of me or my father. I bet Will Ferrell would do a pretty good impression of my father.

QUESTION: And speaking of impressions, our friend, Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” said you do a great impression of Dr. Evil from “Austin Powers”. (Laughter.)

SARAH: If that means putting my curled pinky up to my pursed lips, then—sure.

QUESTION: Mr. President, I know you’re not going to believe this transition, but the Congress and Democrats now have been in charge for the Capitol for 18 months. I wonder if you care to give them a grade.

SARAH: A+, with a curve.

QUESTION: Now, Mr. President, President Carter recently told Charlie Rose the next President could change America’s image in 10 minutes. Here’s what he said: “I think the next President could change the image of this country around the world in 10 minutes by making an inaugural speech that would start off and say, ‘As long as I’m President we will never torture another prisoner, as long as I’m President we will never attack or invade another country unless our own security is directly threatened.’”

SARAH: That was indeed true, in ten minutes.

QUESTION: Mr. President, I’m getting the hook here. If I can ask you one quick political question. You have a clear eye. I wonder if at this point you feel sorry for Senator Clinton.

SARAH: Feeling sorry for Senator Clinton would be like feeling sorry for… well, you know where I’m going with this.

QUESTION: Mr. President, looking ahead, are you worried that through no fault of the candidates, that America may be in for a kind of ugly conversation about race this fall?

SARAH: If you are referring to President Obama’s election—then that is another question that is pregnant with negative assumptions. No conversation is “ugly.” Accusations and paranoia is “ugly.”

QUESTION: Mr. President, as a final question—and thank you so much for taking this time with us—the scale of the disasters in China and Burma is amazing. I wonder how the United States can go about getting aid into those closed regimes.

SARAH: I’m sure someone in the White House has a telephone number or an email address. I myself had turned to the International Medical Corps for donating.

QUESTION: Mr. President, thank you very much for your time. Good luck on your trip.

SARAH: No trips planned right now, but thanks.

QUESTION: Thank you, sir.

SARAH: You mean “ma’am.” Or just “Sarah.” I prefer “Sarah.”