Decision 3012 (Futurama)

Decision 3012 is an episode from the seventh season of mh:besttvshows:Futurama, themed around the then-upcoming 2012 US presidential election.

Plot
President Richard Nixon's Head looks to be heading for another easy re-election, with the only real challenger being Chris Travers, a liberal senator with a mysterious past. With Leela's help, Travers is soon looking like he might beat Nixon, who counters by starting a rumor that Travers wasn't born on Earth. Travers admits that while he was born on Earth, he actually hasn't been born yet and that he was sent back in time to prevent an apocalyptic future that will be caused if Nixon is re-elected.

Why This Decision Sucks 3012 Times

 * 1) Tries to smear all of then-President Barack Obama's critics as "Birthers", i.e. people who think Obama wasn't born in the USA and should never have been eligible to be its president. Only a tiny minority of Republicans ever actually believed this theory, however, and almost nobody took it seriously anymore by 2012.
 * 2) Blatant pro-liberal bias throughout the episode, with Nixon and the other conservative candidates (one of whom is an obvious parody of Sarah Palin, who was thought to be a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2012 before it was won by Mitt Romney) made out to be liars for promoting a low-tax economy, and Travers is shown as honest for wanting to drive taxes way up to pay for public services.
 * 3) Travers sucks at campaigning and only starts doing better because of Leela's help. There's no reason to think he'd do any better as president than Nixon, but the audience is expected to root for him because he has the "correct" political views.
 * 4) No-one ever bothers to suggest that Travers' story about time travel and Nixon's policies causing an apocalypse is just some ridiculous lie he's created to hide the fact that he wasn't born on Earth. Leela at least is smart enough that she should have asked him to somehow prove that he's from the future, but she never does (and Travers' saying that his past self will be born the following day proves nothing, as he could have just bribed some mom-to-be to corroborate his story). Especially since the date of his birth is so conveniently around the time he's accused of not being born on Earth.
 * 5) While the revelation that Travers traveled back in time using the time-travel code from "Bender's Big Score" is a nice call-back to that story, no one bothers pointing out that this makes him a time-travel duplicate, and that he'll die some horrible death as soon as his past self is born. You'd think that Leela of all people would remember this, seeing how the man she once intended to marry died because he turned out to be a time-travel duplicate of Fry (and their wedding was called off when a time-travel duplicate of Hermes got blown up).
 * 6) There is absolutely no reason shown as to why Travers' mother would give her son the middle name "Zaxxar". Like it only exists to parallel the controversy of Obama's middle name being "Hussein".
 * 7) Blatantly recycles the "every vote matters" message from the episode where Nixon's Head was originally elected as President.
 * 8) The writers made a massive screw-up with the dates of Travers' birth and time-traveling, meaning that he can't be any older than in his early-mid 20s. Never mind whether or not he was born on Earth, he wouldn't be old enough to be its President!
 * 9) Awful ending: Travers is elected President, only this causes a grandfather paradox that means that he never needed to travel back in time, and therefore he gets erased from history and Nixon is elected after all. Not only is this very confusing, by extension it means that the apocalyptic future that Travers warned of is going to come true, and all the main characters except for Bender are going to die. This isn't a very uplifting ending, to put it mildly.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) President Nixon's Head gets a bunch of funny lines.
 * 2) Some funny parodies of the Terminator series in the "future war" scenes.
 * 3) A few funny moments, like the "Free Beer" scene that segues from the opening sequence.
 * 4) "Well, you did manage to collect a tremendous urine sample..."