What follows is the text of former President Barack Obama’s farewell address, which he delivered before departing in the interstellar battlecruiser that had landed near the Washington Monument on Friday morning:

I am both surprised and deeply humbled by the decision of the Directorate of the Milky Way to honor me by naming me Galactic Overlord.

Let me be clear. I do not view my apotheosis as Supreme Imperator of the Nine Million Subjugated Planets as a recognition of my own accomplishments.

Rather, it is an affirmation of Milky Wayling leadership on behalf of aspirations held by sentient life-forms across the entire local cluster of galaxies.

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by the Galactic Overlordship, the men, the women, the self-fertilizing clones, the androids, the telepathic hive minds, and the cybernetic avatars who’ve inspired me (during the half hour I’ve been aware of their existence) and inspired the entire galaxy through their courageous pursuit of extending the Milky Way’s hegemony over the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

But I also know that my aggrandizement reflects the kind of cosmos that all Milky Waylings want to build, a trans-galactic imperium that gives life to the promise of our founding documents, such as, uh, that gold-plated recording of Johnny B. Goode that Carl Sagan shot out of the solar system on a space probe … plus, no doubt, some other stuff.

And I know (at least since my conversation with Grand Vizier Xzqhtpv fifteen minutes ago) that throughout history the Overlordship has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes, such as the utter enslavement and/or annihilation of the Andromeda Galaxy.

And that is why I will accept exaltation to Supreme Imperator, as I’ve accepted so many promotions in the past, not just as a convenient career move, not merely as a way to continue to fail upward (although I do wish to extend my sincerest hope to the Altgeld Gardens community that somebody will finally get them organized for a change; yet, let us never forget, I did help get some of the asbestos removed), but as a call to action, a call for, uh … can we back up the Teleprompter here? … a call for all higher species to confront the common challenges facing the Galactic Empire in its 3,452nd eon of prepotency.

Indeed.

And to those doubters who whisper that I’m no more qualified for my new responsibilities than I was to chair the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, that my tenure as Galactic Overlord will prove as ineffectual as all my previous careers at accomplishing anything besides stoking my vanity, that I will soon require yet another promotion to sidestep the looming consequences of my inevitable mediocrity at my latest job, let me remind them that David Axelrod is already spinning my image in infinite parallel universes.

Edited by Steve Sailer