How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (34 page)

Thank you, Suzanne O’Neill, and everyone else at Crown who took the manic ramblings of a presidential trivia nerd and turned them into a real-live book, with a cover and everything. I knew this book was in good hands from the very first email Suzanne wrote me, and I can’t imagine
How to Fight Presidents
finding a home anywhere else.

Thank you, Tom Hawkins, my webmaster, for mastering all that web.

When I ditched work for weeks at a time to finish this book, the
following people dipped into their already small reserves of free time and picked up my slack: Jason Pargin, Robert Brockway, Kristi Harrison, Adam Tod Brown, Cyriaque Lamar, Adam Ganser, Robert Evans, Abe Epperson, Breandan Carter, Cody Johnston, Randall Maynard, and all of the other creative geniuses at
Cracked.com
I might have forgotten. Thank you, Mandy, Billy, Stephen, Jason, Mitchell, Simon, Cody, Alison, Greg, GB, Stewart, and all of the other
actual
geniuses at
Cracked.com
I might have forgotten.

Thank you, Oren Katzeff, for always supporting me and this book and for buying me special edition Presidential Pez dispensers as soon as news broke that we sold the book. Whenever I eat candy out of the hole beneath James Monroe’s chin, I’ll think of you.

Noël Wells, Ben Joseph, Rachel Bloom, Nick Kocher, and Brian McElhaney very graciously donated their time and creative energy to help me work through some last-minute tweaks when my brain stopped functioning, and for that deserve free copies of this book. But every copy sold counts, so please buy your own instead and I’ll just get you all a drink the next time we’re out. Two copies means I’ll get you two drinks. You see how this works.

A special thanks goes to Jack O’Brien, who isn’t just the greatest boss on the planet but also one of the funniest and sharpest comedy writer-editors I’ve ever met. Thanks for all of your notes on the earliest version of this thing and for letting me skip work to write it, unless you didn’t notice that, in which case I worked hard the whole time and frankly am due some overtime pay.

Anytime I ran out of steam and my brain was completely fried after spending twenty straight goddamn hours reading about Millard Goddamn Fillmore only to discover that there’s nothing interesting about Millard Goddamn Fillmore, the following people could be counted on to drop everything and listen to me bitch about Millard Goddamn Fillmore over a late dinner or a series of drinks: Nick Mundy, Liana Maeby, Lisa Marie King, and Samantha Bowling, who was particularly good at dragging me out of my apartment and forcing me to be a social human being and not a weird president-obsessed shut-in.

Thank you to Michael Swaim, my coworker, frequent collaborator, and buddy for life. When I sent the first draft of my book proposal to Michael, his only note was “You should write this, I want to read it now.” So, okay, I did that. Now you write a book.

If I had to actually list all of the wonderful things that Soren Bowie has done for me as a friend, colleague, collaborator, and supporter of
HTFP
, the page count of this book would grow by several hundred, and it seemed dishonest to have a book about president-fighting that featured more pages thanking Soren than anything else. I promise my next book will be
How to Thank Sorens
.

Thanks to the Santa Monica Public Library for not revoking my library card after my admittedly liberal interpretation of your due dates. Thank you to every president for being super crazy. Your as-yet-undiagnosed specific form of mental illness has been tremendous for my career.

I owe lots of hugs and treats to my dog, Jackson O’Brien, who bore the brunt of my panic attacks and late-night venting with the stoicism and dependability of the president for whom he was named. Thank you, Jackson, you good little guy. You’re going to find this very sweet when I eventually teach you how to read.

Daniel O’Brien
is the head writer and creative director of video for
Cracked.com
. Since 2007, he has written over 300 articles for Cracked and is the cocreator, cowriter, and costar of the web series
Cracked: After Hours
. He coedited and cowrote
You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News
(a
New York Times
bestseller) and served as the senior writer for
The De-Textbook
. He’s performed stand-up regularly since 2012, and his work has been featured on
ComedyCentral.com
,
USA Today, Forbes, Splitsider
, and a number of government watch lists that may or may not be related to this book about president-fighting. He lives in Santa Monica, California, with his dog, Jackson.