This Puts Matters in an Entirely New Light

For days now, heart-wrenching tales of furloughed feds have been pouring in.  I myself have had to sell my mother-in-law into slavery to raise money to buy brandy, and we have been reduced to burning our sèvres in the hibachi to keep warm.

Yet now, we read, Congress is considering offering back-pay in full to federal workers for the time missed -- exempt and non-exempt alike.  A remarkable application of the lesson from the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard!

Les ouvriers de la onzième heure, se rendant à la caisse

And this (ahem ahem) changes matters considerably.  Upon mature reflection, I have come to the realization that the Teabaggers are right:   This shutdown needs to go on, and on, and on…

Herewith, then, a revised list of our Minimum Demands, before a Continuing Resolution can be brought to a vote:

(1)  Further analysis has made plain that the key to runaway medical costs is not Obamacare (after all, such inflation has been going on for years), but the practice of medicine itself.  Solution:  Abolish all doctors, and return to a system of cupping and leeches, applied by barbers.

(2)  Too long have simple folk suffered under the paternalist East-Coast elitist insistence that two plus two equals four!  This has got to stop.

Some of our hardliners have been holding out for “five” or even higher;  but in the spirit of irenic compomise, the Republican Caucus offers an official figure of “four and a smidgeon”.

(3)  Effective immediately, the National Bird shall be the dodo.  (The appropriateness of this symbolism is obvious.)