Old 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.


Moral of the story: Be responsible for yourself!


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, CNN, 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 so?


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. Tom Daschle, ***** Gephart, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry
exclaim in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten
rich off the back of the grasshopper, and ALL call for an immediate tax
hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share". Finally, the EEOC
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 Clinton 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 Clinton 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 bits of
the ant's food while the government house he is in, which so 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.

*
*