Not Bambi Mail

When I first had email at home, I used to get the dreaded email forwards, and they were all of a type - we called them Bambi Mail.

The archetypal Bambi Mail was an email from someone who was both a friend and a woman and was usually composed of short text jokes, mostly about being women (or about other people being men) with a slathering of lawyer jokes. Occasionally you'd get the $250 Red Velvet Cake recipe or some other urban legend, but generally the theme was some version of sisterly solidarity that you could have just by hitting "forward", inputting your entire address book and pressing "enter".

Bambi and her friends presumably wobbled off on their high heels to Facebook a few years ago, because Bambi Mail slowed to a trickle. But the emails kept on coming. Now they come from men - shall we call it Faline Mail? - and are strongly political.

Politics I don't mind, but the urban legends picked up steam along with the Faline Mail. In many cases, the emails are both - jokes and digs at Obama that normal people remember first being said about Clinton or even Bush II, just found billowing in cyberspace, renamed and sent on. Some are just lies, and some obfuscations of various sorts. The one that arrived today is just mind-boggling.

It was subject-lined "No comment necessary" and the sender had helpfully added the text:

Factually it's a great illustration

It is?

  

Picture of Clint: I hear you spent $678 million on the Obamacare website. Really?
Picture of Obama: That number has been greatly exaggerated by the right wing...
Picture of Clint: Sure it is. So how many citizens is this plan intended to cover?
Picture of Obama: All 315 million in all 57 states.
Picture of Clint: So you're telling me that instead of building this site, you could've just given each of us $2 million?
Picture of empty chair: [No text]

I've been trying to work out if  "$2 million each" is a joke, in the same way that "57 states" is a joke based on Obama once saying he'd visited all 50 states save for one left to go, stopping mid-sentence when he realized he'd only visited the 48 contiguous states, and still had one of those yet to visit - leading him to misspeak and say "I've been in all fifty...seven states? I think one left to go."

But I can't see the joke. I guess math just isn't Prop!Clint's strong point. Whatever, it must have worked on at least one person, as they found it out there on the Webz, packaged it up and sent it to Undisclosed Recipient, which includes me. I hope the others aren't the sort to slip six or seven decimal points or this one could run and run.