And the Moral Is.....

[Lorrie]

OLD VERSION:

The ant works hard in the sweltering heat all summer
long, building his house and laying up supplies for the
winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is 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 sweltering heat all summer
long, building his house and laying up supplies for the
winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is 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, PBS, CNN, 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.

Nancy Pelosi & John Kerry exclaim in an
interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich
off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an
immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair
share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity &
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
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 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: Be careful how you vote in 2008!!

[Braggi]

... MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote in 2008!![/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE]

Yes! Be sure to vote for the candidate most likely to reduce wasteful military spending which is, of course, welfare (except with a few more zeros tacked on) to huge corporations, many of which give out taxpayer money to foreigners.

It will be so much better to keep that money at home instead of paying it to foreign mercenaries like the Bush/McCain machine is doing.

Be sure to vote for Obama in '08.

-Jeff

[theindependenteye]

>>MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote in 2008!![/quote]

Another version:

The ant works hard in the sweltering heat all summer
long, building his house and laying up supplies for the
winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs
and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant sees the heating bill go up, he’s laid off, gets a couple of minimum-wage part-time jobs, ships his kid off to the army because no way can he afford college, is bankrupted by one visit to the ER, and votes Republican because they convince him it’s all the fault of the Mexican dung beetle.

The grasshopper, having no food in the house, goes out to a great restaurant with his friends, who all toast their wisdom in buying Exxon stock, then dances and plays the winter away while encouraging the ant to keep up his hopes.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Moral? Huh? You kidding?

Cheers--
Conrad

[Lorrie]

sent out the ant and grasshopper story and got this version back.. thought you'd be interested in it. I'm going to pass it out.


The Ant and the Grasshopper
(Newer Version)

Ant is fat and happy in his official Antopia presidential residence, which is the product of his hard work as well as the advantages he has as an ant in a land where grasshoppers, after years of slavery, are still regarded with suspicion and have trouble finding work, or even shopping without being followed by suspicious ants convinced they are going to rob them.
Ant ignores repeated warnings from his security detail about one fanatical group of termites from Moundistan which they believe have intentions of invading Ant's home and damaging it. Ant ignores these warnings despite knowledge that previously termites from Moundistan have attempted to damage other houses by flying down the chimney. One day it happens, a group of Moundistan termites easily cross through police checkpoints, manned by clueless, underpaid private contract workers, and succeed in penetrating Ant's house through the chimney, causing horrific damage. In the ensuing uproar over how this could have happened, Cockaroacha Rice, Ant's top advisor, tells an unquestioning press corps, "Who could have anticipated that termites would come into our land and choose to fly down a chimney to damage that house?" A few independent newspapers report that Cockaroacha had been warned of precisely this method, but in the growing war fever in the land, this news story is ignored.
Ant finds the world on his side and that of his country, Antopia. Outpourings of grief and consolation for Antopia resound throughout the world. Unfortunately, he will soon squander all of this good will and make Antopia a pariah among nations. Ant organises an army and successfujly storms Moundistan, succeeding in driving out most of the bad termites, who had actually infiltrated and terrorised Moundistan over the past few years. But suddenly a transformation takes place in Ant. He starts to denounce another termite mound, Moundaq, run by a thug of a termite who terrorises his own subjects (as do many many other heads of other termite mounds.) With very little evidence, Ant goes to the Antopian population and scares the bejesus out of them. Using forged military overflight photographs and the testimony of transparenty lying and grandiose informants who were driven out of Moundaq for thievery, corruption, and anti-government plots, Ant claims that Antopia is directly threatend by Moundaq, despite not possessing any real intelligence from within that termite mound.
It turns out that a group of Ant advisors had planned for twenty years to invade Moundaq, establish it as an Antopian foothold in the termite area, and then use Moundaq as a launching pad for invasions of other termite mounds. These plotters were quite open in their plans, writing of them in scholarly papers from right-wing think tanks, but the Antopian citizenry did not know this at the time, because a groveling and lazy press corps failed to follow up on these articles. Frightened by Ant's stories of coming attacks against them, Antopians overwhelming support the Ant invasion, which his advisors confidently proclaim will be quick, with ordinary termites embracing the Antopian soldiers with open arms and showering them with flowers.
Sadly, those flowers turned out to be bombs and bullets, inflicting horriffic injuries on Antopia's soldiers. To this day Antopia is fighting against the Moundaqis and now Antopia does not have enough soldiers to put down a second rebellion in Moundistan. Antopia, the most powerful country on earth, now does not have enough soldiers to fight a second serious war, and the whole world knows it. Thousands of Antopian's young citizens are coming home in body bags, although Ant allows no press coverage of those solemn homecomings, or with serious physical and mental injuries. Hundreds of thousands of Moundaqis have been killed or maimed, many of them fighting on Antopia's side.
Even so, despite clear evidence that he either lied or deliberately ignored the truth about the Moundaq, Ant continued to use the trumped up threat from Moundaq to take away the liberties of Antopians, hiring surly private contractors to search them using machines that reveal every fault line on their bodies, cutting them off from public institutions by using overwhelming security and shows of force, and even seizing Antopian citizens and shipping them off to third-world countries to be tortured without any legal process. Then one day a handsome young Grasshopper hops into town to challenge Ant's lies and murderous policies. To fight him, the opposition puts up a very old, crabby Cane Rat, who has trouble remembering his own name and cannot keep his stories straight about what he favors for Antopia. The rest is history......