How Can Any American Be So Stupid?!

One of my Republican neighbors thought it would be funny to send this story to me. I don’t know who the author is, but I’m willing to bet it’s some yahoo, hill-billy who’s never opened a book since 8th grade. I’ve corrected the grammar for him before posting. Below you can read my response. Enjoy.

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

CLASSIC 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. Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

MODERN 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 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 to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer? Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing "It's Not Easy Being Green."
Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing "We shall overcome". Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.
Al Gore 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 EOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper 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 recipients. The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bit of the ant's food, while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

MORAL OF THE STORY: VOTE REPUBLICAN

Now after you’ve finished throwing up and asking yourself, "How can any American be so STUPID?" read my response to this yahoo, hill-billy:

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER
THE VERSION BUSH DOESN’T WANT US TO KNOW
by Kellen Wilson

If this were truly a fable where the ant was a Republican it would go more like this: First of all, you don't believe that the ant would be doing any hard work, do you? All hard work would be done by the grasshopper. And at a very low wage, I might add. You see, the Republican ant busted up the grasshopper union leaving the grasshopper to work at a much lower wage. This means that the mother grasshopper has to work just to bring in the same salary that the father grasshopper used to bring in alone. Then one day the Republican ant decides that even without the unions, wages were still too high and things like health insurance and safety regulations for his workers were eating into his profits and bonus packages, so he decides to move his anthill across the border where he can get Mexican beetles to do the work for dung.
Across the border the Republican ant is free to plunder the resources of another country and reap wild profits without having to worry about such foolish things as living wages, laws to protect the environment, safety regulations and child labor laws. This, of course, leaves the grasshopper without any meaningful work and he is forced into degrading service work ("would you like fries with that caterpillar, sir?") or playing the lottery. Some can't find work at all and end up homeless or sometimes the grasshopper feels hopeless and turns to drugs or crime, but that's okay, too because now the ant has more contracts to reward some of his biggest campaign donors in the flourishing new prison industrial complex industry. But wait, something's wrong. Even after moving his anthill across the border to exploit cheap labor and natural resources the ant is still losing money leg over claw. How can this be happening? After all, the ant is working the capitalist, free enterprise system full throttle, which means everything should be hunky-dory. Instead, the stock market is a free fall, 3 million jobs have been lost in the first 3 years under an ant administration, the economy is in a recession, the country is 2 trillion dollars in the hole, the states are broke, there’s no money for schools or infrastructure, Veterans of Foreign Wars benefits, nor any other vital social program. Of course, none of this stops the ant from getting huge tax breaks. And you would think with all of the tax breaks, privatization, corporate welfare and deregulation the ant's businesses would be thriving, wouldn't you? - You would be wrong. Because of mismanagement, corruption, malfeasance, and crooked Ponzi schemes the ant has run many multi-billion dollar corporations into the ground, screwed the grasshopper out of his life savings, stored the money away in offshore banking accounts and ran to Congress for a bailout, which will be paid with the grasshopper's taxes.

MORAL OF THE STORY: REPUBLICANS HAVE NO MORALS.

Comments

[Steve Bates]

LOL! Well, except for the parts that were too true to be funny. I'd call your story (appropriately enough) fabulous, if W hadn't ruined the word for all of us. Thanks!

[karla]

thanks for telling it like it is..sorry it isnt funny to me. true things are to painful to be funny. read my book..Bartertown. Its due out this spring

[MM]

Thanks, I needed this!! Idiot Republican friend sent me this idiotic story and I needed a snappy retort. Didn't feel like putting in the time needed to appropriately rip them so, this was more than PERFECT. Kudos to you my friend!

[Ronifae]

Googled to find this and it's great. Do you mind if your new Moral story it gets posted on other sites?

[Ken]

I'm sorry to say this, but your story is too true to be funny. :(

[Kris]

Oh, I thought it was pretty funny.

But....as a moderate Republican small buisness owner, I have to stand up for the morally responsible ants who took the risk to start their own hills, hire a few grasshoppers, and pay a bigger chunk of their income in to the social pot.

And....as one of those morally responsible ants who is struggling to keep his hill and his grasshoppers afloat, if you can convince all the "blue" insect ecosystems to secede and form their own environment and let the "red" ecosystems try survive without the "blue" ones, I'm right there with you guys!

If the honest ants and motivated grasshoppers work together, we can come up with something better in '08.

[Twinmama]

I love this! You really got it right...

[Josh]

Both were boring. There should only be one party, and thats Joshican.

[California Health Insurance]

It is unfortunate to hear so many lack health insurance. We really need to improve our health care system. Health insurance is a major aspect to many and we should help everyone get covered.

[renee]

I think your story was idiotic, and that you don't even look at what's going on in the world around you because you're so busy helping illegal immigrants get over the border to steal all our jobs (THAT PEOPLE LIKE ME ARE MORE THAN WILLING TO TAKE, THANK YOU!) If you don't like our country, good. Move somewhere else. If so many people want to come here that has to say SOMETHING. If you think it's awful how they get treated, then go reform their country. K?

[Adam]

How can you complain about the so-called "hillbilly's" grammar, when you write something this choppy. I have a headache after reading your version....thanks!

[Mac]

The Dim version of the story is a funny spin on reality. Dims believe the mob riddled unions are the best judge of wage salaries. But how else would the union foreman's high school educated son find a job for $50 an hour watching a press? When is the last time you bought a vehicle from Detroit?... Over-priced peice of crap!
Also, I forget, who signed NAFTA? I thought it was Bill Clinton...I could be wrong, but Bill Clinton seems to be sticking in my mind for some reason. Yep, I am pretty sure it was Bill and Hillary show that is responsible for the fine peice of legislation.
Finally, I seem to also remember that all the big business scams happened during the Clinton Administration and were prosecuted under the Bush Admin. The job losses were a result of the recession that started under Clinton's admin. Everyone with an education, outside of Berkely, knows that it takes 2-3 years for a Presidents policies to affect the economy. However, the economic problems were compounded by the "attack here" sign that the Clinton placed over the US, with his gutting our security agencies and military. It's a wonder it only took Bush 3 years to fix his mess. But I guess that is more selective memory on your part.
Market freefall? Stocks have increassd 20% since Bush took office. Where have you been? Based on your babbling diatribe above, you probably sank all of your money in Aqua Dots and the Chinese toy market and took out a variable home loan way above what you could afford. I can understand why you Dims want another Dim president to bail you out of your bad investment decisions. I can hear the whining now...Hillary, Obama, please bail me out...I'm an idiot and can't be trusted to make adult decisions on my own!!!

[Veronica]

Thanks! Didn't want to take the time to come up w/ a response to this email that I just got. Thought you'd like to know that even 5 yrs after you wrote this, it's still be read and is helpful!

[Veronica]

I meant "still being read" (sorry- typo in my previous post and I can't figured out how to edit it!)

[paddyo]

If you really want to turn our once-great nation into a Socialist country, then go ahead and vote for Obama. And if you elect him, I, as one of the 5% of the taxpayers that Obama apparently thinks will support the other 95%, will close down my business and move to another country. I can afford to do that because I worked my butt off for 30 years, and I damn sure didn't need a handout from the government to do it! I paid almost $300,000 in taxes last year, and I can assure you I will not pay any more. Why would I choose to live in a country that wants to take what I worked so hard for to give handouts to those who chose to sit on their butts and wait for just that - a handout?

[Kurtiss]

You left out the part about Dick Gephardt lambasting the ant for "winning life's lottery."

[Kurtiss]

In the sequel, Obama gets elected president and the grasshopper never has another complaint. And the ant is only too happy to fork it all over to assuage the guilt he has always felt for working so hard and creating wealth.