WASHINGTON — Facing an ongoing set of failures on domestic and foreign fronts, the Congress of the United States has filed for Chapter 11 protection under the Moral Bankruptcy Codes.
“Between the clear selling-out we did a few years ago to get votes from the right-wing fundamentalist religious loonies and the way we’ve sold conservatism, America and the values our great nation was founded upon for a mess of pottage, we’re basically out of bucks to pass,” said Bill Frist (R - MD) on Friday.
“Forget about Iraq, Afghanistan, smallpox or even the US-Mexico border,” Frist said. “Basically our shit hasn’t been in one coil for years.”
Apologizing for “ethical spendthriftery,” Frist listed past and present conditions as part of the reason Congress must seek Moral Bankruptcy protection. “We were really irresponsible in 2000 and 2001,” he said. “We had blank checks, and we signed off on everything. So we pushed through a war that — really — we knew even then we couldn’t afford.
“It got worse,” Frist continued. “We became addicted to the lifestyle. We stole from our parents, revamping Medicare in 2003, and now those chickens are coming home to roost too in the form of denial of coverage to uncounted numbers of senior citizens.” The referrence to the Medicare “doughnut hole” was met with some hostility among network journalists, blank stares from more than a few bloggers, and deafening eye-rolling from most everyone else.
“Sorry, Mom and Dad,” Frist went on. “I know you needed those medicines to stay alive, and I know you could have had them for much, much less from Canada — but that’s just not how we saw it back then. Our pharma lobbyists clouded our eyes, but hey, we let them, after all.
“We couldn’t really tell the difference between those meds and the War on Drugs we’re still waging.
“We’ve been spending a lot on that too, blowing wads of credibility on silly advertisements targeting teens that have no measurable effect whatsoever while at the same time acting as aoplogists for tobacco, alcohol and — of course — the pharmaceutical industry.
“Oh, except where it comes to actually getting drugs to our seniors,” he added.
“And now, with the Pentagon telling us that there’s no way they can continue in Iraq for one more year without either massive troop withdrawals or massively more funding than the Secretary of Defense wants to put forward, well, I guess our little house-of-cards fantasy world has finally fallen down.”
For those and other reasons — and to protect themselves from fallout when millions of Americans finally realize how badly they’ve been betrayed by their putative representatives — Frist has announced the decision to seek Moral Bankruptcy protection.
“We’ve fucked things up so badly I don’t think there’s any way we can recover,” Frist said. “And, really, given our track record, would you want us to try to fix anything?”
