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The Original Version:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long,
building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The
grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the
summer away.
Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has
no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
The New Liberal Version:
It starts out the same, but when winter comes, the shivering
grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the
ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold
and starving. CBS, NBC and ABC show up and provide pictures of the
shivering grasshopper next to film of the ant in his comfortable
home with a table filled with food.
America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that,
in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to
suffer so? Then a representative of the NAAGB (The National
Association for the Advancement of Green Bugs) shows up on
NightLine and charges the ant with "Green Bias" and makes the case
that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of
greenism. Kermit the frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper,
and everybody cries when he sings "It's Not Easy Being Green."
Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on
the CBS Evening News and tell a concerned Dan Rather that they will
do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the
prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the
Reagan summers, or as Bill refers to it, the "Temperatures of the
80's". Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with Peter
Jennings that the Ant has gotten rich off the "back of the
grasshopper", and calls for an immediate tax hike on the Ant to
make him pay his "fair share".
Finally the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and
Anti-Greenism Act", RETROACTIVE to the beginning of the
summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number
of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive
taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. Hillary gets her
old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit
against the ant, and the case is
tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed
from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases
on Thursday afternoon between 1:30 and 3:00 PM when there are no
talk shows scheduled.
The ant loses the case.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the
last bits of the ant's food while the government house he's in -
which just happens to be the ant's old house - crumbles around him
since he doesn't know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared
in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling
most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill Clinton standing
before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new
era of "Fairness" has dawned in America.
Author Unknown
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