In a stunning late night press conference, the Alien Legal Entity Corporation announced the re-call of its premier artificial human, the Romney-bot (also known as ShamMan). Mr. Josh A. Lot, Chief Information Officer at ALEC, said the current Romney-bot, version 2.55, is being replaced overnight by the much enhanced version 3.0. He claimed they expected the transition to be smooth and utterly seamless. A reporter from The Times asked, if this was going from version 2.55 to 3.0, how many earlier versions of Romney-bot had there been, and wouldn’t people notice the change?
Mr. Lot smiled a lot, pointing out, “We have had at least 16 versions of our marvelous plastic politician, and the general public has never noticed when we modified or replaced one version with another, so it will be no different this time. ” He distributed copies of a condensed “Story of Romney-Bot” to the press corps:
“In the 1980’s ALEC introduced a basic vulture capitalist model 1.0, called ShamMan, which was used at Brain Capital. ShamMan was a wild success , making bundles of money at Brain, after going through a couple of improvements in versions 1.1 and 1.2. ALEC was then asked to create a more political version, and we had to make just some minor tweaks to go from vulture to politician, so that release was named 2.0 and formally named Romney-bot to distinguish it from its predecessor. Romney-bot 2.0 had a trial run in the Massachusetts Senate Race in 1994 against Ted Kennedy, but, as you know, it was not successful. We learned a lot from that race. Romney-bot returned to Brain Capital and made even more money, thus proving there is not much difference between vulture and politician after all, and version 2.2 raised its profile in 1999 by taking over the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympics.
Several major players with serious money then contracted with ALEC to develop Romney-bot 2.3 as an experimental model to run for Governor of Massachusetts in 2004 as a moderate, and it won! This was a real breakthrough, and led directly to version 2.35 which ran in the Republican presidential primary in 2008, but lost to John McCain. It was in this version that our programmers began flipping the internal switches from moderate to radical reactionary, a process which accelerated after McCain chose Palin over Romney-bot for his running mate. Romney-bot 2.4 showed up in the 2011 primaries for U.S. President. These primaries were a brutal test of our bot-system. We had to do so many patches and emergency modifications, often several times in the same day, that we almost lost track of the versions, until Romney-bot won the party’s nomination simply by being the last Republican standing. We then went to version 2.5 for the general election, but we found ourselves still making emergency patches, 2.51, 2.52, 2.53, 2.54, 2.55. Now, Alien Legal Entity Corporation is pleased to announce the perfected version, Romney-bot 3.0.(Signed: Biggers Pryck, CEO)
A reporter from Writeurs finished reading the “Story of Romney-Bot,” and commented, “My word! Romney-bot has more versions than Apple! How do you keep track? What have you done with all these earlier versions?”
“Oh, they are still around,” Josh A. Lot said carelessly,” and can be resurrected whenever they’re needed. Waste not, want not, you know, that’s a very conservative value. As for keeping track, well, I feel all that flipping and flopping are what caused the instability in the software, and Tourette syndrome behavior to which the purchasers of Romney-bot objected. They are what compelled us to do the major make-over and roll out version 3.0.”
“Are you telling us that we’ll be seeing some major changes in 3.0 Romney-bot’s campaign? Like what?” The Times reporter asked incredulously.
The CIO smiled some more. “Guess we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?” He paused. “We have hopefully eliminated those unsettling zombie spasms of 2.55, and in Romney-bot 3.0 we installed a whole new drop-down pick-list of choice phrases and words used by the little people that should make Romney-bot seem less cold and more like a three-dimensional human. The bot can throw these phrases out when he talks occasionally, especially to the press. Of course, not all the new programs originate entirely inside Romney-bot, although 3.0 will be very aggressive about taking advantage of any negative shockers that turn up about that other guy. Just be ready when it happens.”
“An October surprise?” asked Dispatch-Pilot columnist Lazy Santini eagerly.
Mr. Lot ignored him with his habitual smirk, and said, “By the way, we have also made some changes to the snob-wife app. We decided that app was actually reinforcing some of Romney-bot 2.55’s undesirable behavior. We are very proud of this modification, because we did not want to lose the faux elitism so basic to the app, when all we wanted was simply to make it even more appealing to the common bigots and vulgar social climbers who are a major part of the Republican base.”
“But version 3.0 is not the same one that earned the nomination,” objected Santini. “Won’t the substitution be invalid?”
“Certainly not. It’s no different from Exxon and Mobil still being the same company once they became Exxon-Mobil. Corporations are eternal people, remember, and Romney-bot is like that.”
“One last question,” insisted the Writeur’s stringer, “Would you care to reveal who those wealthy purchasers of Romney-bot are?”
“No. But, surely you can guess.”
Snark alert, you betcha
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