The Grasshopper and the Ant
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:
The story 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 tells 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.