Stories only Fools Would Believe
This being April Fools Day, I thought I would try to come up with something satirical and untrue to write about. However, because I value my credibility and would not want to appear to be passing on incorrect information, I wanted the stories to be so absurd that it would be quite apparent to everyone that I was just making stuff up. Unfortunately, I couldn't come up with anything. My ideas were too far fetched to qualify as good satire. Here are some of the "out there" story lines I thought about before rejecting as too far fetched.
1. President Barack Obama, without any congressional authorization, announced that the federal government would pay for vehicle repairs covered under warranties from GM and Chrysler. The President claimed that the program was authorized by a congressional appropriation that was designed to purchase "toxic assets" from banks.
2. Explaining that it was a compromise budget requiring "hard choices," President Barack Obama announced a spending plan that included a budget deficit in the coming year higher than the entire budget in the final year of the Clinton administration only 8 years ago. No reporters asked how much the deficit would have been if no hard choices had been required.
3. U.S. Senator Charles Grassley advised AIG executives accepting contractual bonuses to resign and kill themselves. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), evidently finding the notion of suicide to be unacceptable, listened to a series of death threats against those individuals and renewed his demand for their names while declining to promise any confidential treatment for the requested information.
4. Although elections were held last November, the winner of the election for one of Minnesota's U.S. Senate seats has still not been officially finalized, and no Senator has yet been seated as of April Fool's Day, though seating comedian Al Franken today might be fitting. No major election reforms have been announced, though various liberal groups remain staunchly opposed to restrictions that would require voters to somehow prove they are who they say they are. Texas Democrats, most of whom were born after the LBJ presidency, claim that there has never been a problem with voter fraud in the state.
5. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine pointed out that most health care measures from past generations, including Medicare, would have never passed if projections about their costs had been accurate at the time. As such, the article urged policymakers to ignore or be dishonest about future costs in order to gain passage of a universal health care plan.
See? All of these are too absurd. There is no point in expanding any of them.
1. President Barack Obama, without any congressional authorization, announced that the federal government would pay for vehicle repairs covered under warranties from GM and Chrysler. The President claimed that the program was authorized by a congressional appropriation that was designed to purchase "toxic assets" from banks.
2. Explaining that it was a compromise budget requiring "hard choices," President Barack Obama announced a spending plan that included a budget deficit in the coming year higher than the entire budget in the final year of the Clinton administration only 8 years ago. No reporters asked how much the deficit would have been if no hard choices had been required.
3. U.S. Senator Charles Grassley advised AIG executives accepting contractual bonuses to resign and kill themselves. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), evidently finding the notion of suicide to be unacceptable, listened to a series of death threats against those individuals and renewed his demand for their names while declining to promise any confidential treatment for the requested information.
4. Although elections were held last November, the winner of the election for one of Minnesota's U.S. Senate seats has still not been officially finalized, and no Senator has yet been seated as of April Fool's Day, though seating comedian Al Franken today might be fitting. No major election reforms have been announced, though various liberal groups remain staunchly opposed to restrictions that would require voters to somehow prove they are who they say they are. Texas Democrats, most of whom were born after the LBJ presidency, claim that there has never been a problem with voter fraud in the state.
5. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine pointed out that most health care measures from past generations, including Medicare, would have never passed if projections about their costs had been accurate at the time. As such, the article urged policymakers to ignore or be dishonest about future costs in order to gain passage of a universal health care plan.
See? All of these are too absurd. There is no point in expanding any of them.
posted by MCO at 12:07 PM
1 Comments:
I have one more absurd tale that is too "out there" for satire. America subtly, or not so subtly, shifted into a fascist state one day last week when President Obama asked a CEO of a private corporation to step down. Nah! No one could possibly believe that!
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