Mr. President,

In these, the waning months of your presidency, it appears to me as though you have a unique opportunity to do not necessarily the easy thing, but the appropriate thing.  Twenty-eight years ago, President Carter granted amnesty to Vietnam-era draft dodgers.  Nearly a century and a half ago, President Andrew Johnson – seeing an already-divided America – pardoned thousands of defeated Confederates.  You now have a chance to follow suit – and that is why I call for you to move 5,000 troops out of Afghanistan by Thanksgiving and additional 10,000 by December 24th.

Mr. President, I assure you I'm not one of those people who don't see the big picture.  I understand that this War on Terror is an important one and quitting now would ruin the possibility of liberty abroad.  I know that pulling out would be, in effect, saying that all of our brave men and women fought and perished for nothing.  I'm with you.  I believe.  I'm not calling for our troops to come home, rather in the spirit of this War on Terror, I'm calling for our troops to be moved to a more pressing location against a man whom we've lost track of.  I'm not talking about Iran; this particular ruler easily has more access to nuclear materials than the entire Middle East combined.  I'm not referring to Kim Jong-il and North Korea either, who pales in comparison to this man's economic strong-hold over America. 

In fact, every year Santa Claus violates literally thousands of international copyright laws from the sanctity of his North Pole workshop.  In completely disregarding these laws, Santa brazenly manufactures products to which he has no legal claim.  In turn, toy, electronic, and (God forbid) clothing manufacturers are being beaten by their own products during the busiest, most profitable time of year.  How can Santa Claus afford to dominate our nation's companies so easily?

Outsourcing.  While American companies rely on white-collar hierarchies working above droves of factory workers, Santa has both cut out the middle-man and is employing mythical pixies at pennies on the dollar.  How are our companies expected to compete with such a radical difference in expenses?  As you can probably deduce, this strategy doesn't only affect presidents of major corporations, but more importantly our blue-collared factory workers – the backbone of your great nation.  With our companies losing it is the little guy who suffers, our good men and women are losing benefits and even their jobs because Santa Claus has manipulated our system and his own workers and yet we stand idly by and do nothing.  Santa has slyly used the once-a-year tactic to downplay his harm on our economy, but the decades have added up and the negative effects on our entire economic infrastructure are very real.

This leads us to Santa's workshop.  For years journalists, such as myself, have pondered the logistics of a workshop large and efficient enough to produce millions upon millions of products in the course of just a year.  Where would such a workshop be located in the arctic tundra and more curiously how would one power it?  For years popular opinion attributed powering the workshop to electrical generators powered by windmill technology.  This hypothesis was debunked when our own attempts at arctic windmills bore at best mediocre results.  Further searching took us to 1991with the disbanding of the U.S.S.R.  Though records are incomplete at best, several documents detailing the Soviet fire-sale of nuclear arms make mention of a man named "Kringle" buying up a large percent of Soviet Russia's nuclear materials and transporting them by way of Siberia.  Not only was such a transaction made without the knowledge or authority of the IAEA, but it leaves our world with massive amounts of nuclear material unaccounted for.  It is for this reason that we now believe Santa's workshop is powered by sustainable nuclear energy with plenty of material left over.  It would not be too bold to assume that a man so run by greed would sell some of these materials to the highest bidder and anyone who doubts Santa's capability to launch a nuclear missile from the North Pole with lightning-quick speed and accuracy would do well stewing over how he manages the circle the globe in one evening.

Whether or not Santa Claus intends on weaponizing whatever nuclear materials he may have, the existence of a nuclear power plant on a polar ice cap poses an abominable threat to the world at large.  With the entire world at the mercy of holes in the ozone and corresponding global warming and ascending water levels, Santa's nuclear plant threatens to melt the arctic north more vigorously than we could have ever imagined.  With our nation, among others, ignorantly believing that global warming is being caused by fossil fuel emissions and scrambling for alternative fuels, Santa's workshop goes unnoticed.  If anything, Santa profits from our attempts to free ourselves from foreign oil.  It weakens Middle Eastern markets and furthers his previously-mentioned economic monopoly over the rest of the world.

While the issues detailed above are enough for concern, it is another issue that truly troubles me, Mr. President.  Despite the grave dangers Santa brings to our country, you have allowed him to infiltrate our popular culture – the heart of our nation.  Every year Santa makes countless appearances in American films, television programs, melodies, and advertisements – his image imposed on a wide variety of products and I can hardly imagine why.  I doubt very much that we would allow another dictator's image (Kim Jong-il for instance) to appear on a coffee mug and yet here we are.  Rather than teaching our children to fear this danger to our society, we teach them to love him, write to him, and interact with him.  In effect, we are breeding armies of our own children into support of man who can so easily destroy them and I say enough.

I know it won't be the popular thing to do Mr. President.  Over the generations Santa has garnered the support of millions of unknowing victims.  I know it won't be easy to apprehend him, as you know Santa deploys literally thousands of decoys in malls across the world.  In fact, reading this now, I bet it sounds pretty silly with all that's wrong in our world for me to ask you to invest so much time, money and American lives hunting down an enigmatic bearded man in an arctic desert in dependence of natives who don't want us there (penguins are notoriously territorial.)  But, Mr. President, as I alluded to earlier, this is the right time for a man as headstrong as yourself at the end of your final term to do what's right for America.

Thank you,

Andy Segedin
Philadelphia, PA