When someone asks me what job I would most like to have, I always answer, “Ex-President.”

An ex-president gets the same salary for life that a serving member of the Cabinet like the Secretary of Defense gets. He gets a huge office and staff. He gets Secret Service protection. He gets a few million up front for his memoirs and makes speeches for a hundred grand a clip on a bad day.

Or he can follow the Thurgood Marshall Route. When Thurgood Marshall announced he was retiring from the Supreme Court, reporters asked him what he was going to do after that.

Marshall replied:

“Sit on my ass.”

But there is always a fly in the ointment. The biggest obstacle to my making the career move I desire is that, in order to be an ex-president, you have to be president first.

My chances of being elected president are slightly less than the probability of my being named as the new pope.

The president alone has very little power to change things. But one thing I could do ( some will object, but I know how it could be done) would be to declare a state of emergency on crime and make every American citizen a Federal agent with the right to carry a weapon.

I would then ask congress to give me the money to make this agent status limited to those who are repeat felons or insane or congressmen. That would require a good deal of money which the president does not have. But I would give them a deadline of three months. If the money is not forthcoming, EVERYBODY would get a permit.

If the courts don’t like it, I would tell them what President Jackson did, “The Supreme Court has made their decision, now let them enforce it.”

As president, I would be saying that a LOT.

Shepard Smith on Fox News is a Southerner, and he makes no bones about it. He just said, “We still have some Southern civility here.” He refers to the South by its other name, God’s Country. He speaks fondly of the University of Mississippi Rebels.

Smith has no Southern “accent.” But on the air, Roger Mudd has no “accent” either. But in person, Mudd has a VERY Southern “accent.”

I put “accent” in quotes because WE don’t talk funny, THEY do. Right after Jimmy Carter won the election of 1976, Tennessee Ernie Ford said, “Finally we are going to have a president who doesn’t have an accent.”

Smith talks like a Southerner. He makes fast jokes and is entertaining. He makes you relax.

And I always suspect he knows a lot of things he’s not allowed to say.