“Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten should resign! United States Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick should resign!” Mr. Gore shrieked. “Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman should resign!”
After receiving many complaints from neighbors, police were dispatched to remove Gore from the tree, but were unsuccessful. “We sent a couple of patrol cars down there and basically told him to move on, dot org,” said police spokesman Charles Brill. “That’s when he threatened to jump.”
After Gore vowed to leap from the tree if Steven R. Blust, the Chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission did not resign, the police brought in an outside negotiator to defuse the mounting crisis: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.
In an attempt to remind the former Vice President about all the people who cared about him, Dean used his own megaphone to scream a list of the states Gore carried in 2000.
“California!” Dean shouted. “New York! Massachusetts! Iowa! New Mexico! Oregon!”
The stalemate finally ended around 2 a.m. when the two men’s megaphones ran out of batteries and Gore sheepishly descended from the tree.
In a brief statement to reporters, Gore said, “What the world needs now is a solar-powered megaphone, and that is what I will invent next.”
