bizarreville

The President had announced with great fanfare the birth of a new Budget deficit reduction commission…a blue ribbon committee charged with taking a close examination of the deficit and deciding what actions could be taken.

But there was a problem, which staffers inside the White house later described as a cluster F#&*.  The President had privately instructed his Deficit Czar to organize a toothless effort to study deficit reduction.  And naturally, the obedient-to-a-fault Czar started tracking-down and recruiting candidates with no teeth.

He had started with the National Hockey League, particularly with retired players who played in the era when men were men…no helmets, no mouthguards, proud of getting into bloodbaths on the ice and pulling the jersey over an opponent’s head.  These guys proudly displayed their toothless displays as a badge of honor.  But, unfortunately, these fellows, a bit battered from too many slap-shot pucks to the noggin, said they were not interested unless they would hold the committee meetings on the ice.

Next they went to the Bizarreville Affordable Dentures office to do some recruiting in the lobby.  But a lot of these people were only about as smart as a congressman, so could not pass the basic intelligence test.  Plus, the Czar was not sure if people with false teeth truly qualified as “toothless”, and he was just a bit too nervous to ask the President for clarification.

But finally the team managed to scrape together enough toothless wonders to have a meeting, and the cuts began.  The first item to get cut was, as no surprise, all government-sponsored dental care.  All dental programs for government employees, military personnel, and officials would be gone…zip.  Savings would be in the multiple billions.

Next item cut:  Food Stamps.  Their rationale was if people don’t have food, they can go to the soup kitchens like the rest of us.  Or they can just make their own soup, just like grammaw used to do.  More billions.

Third cut:  All earmarks.  No one at the toothless table knew what an earmark was.  So they just cancelled them all.  More billions.

The Gummers started going nuts on all the frivolous spending on National Endowment of the Arts, studies of Polar Bear mating habits in Alaska, embryonic stem cell research, and Acorn – whatever the hell that is.  They cut out Medicaid completely but agreed to provide each current Medicaid recipient with a bottle of Vicks VapoRub to help with the transition. 

In the end, the Toothless Deficit Commission cut out hundreds and hundreds of little streams that were flowing into Pisswater Channel, and figured out how to balance the whole budget without a tax increase.  But when they presented their study to the President, he looked puzzled and dumbfounded.  All he could say was, “Ahhh…errr…ummm…duh…I mean….hmmmmm.”  But the President thanked the committee for their good work, complimented them on their wholesome “rural beauty”, but indicated that he had to leave for a security briefing in 5 minutes as he gave them the bum’s rush.

He gently placed the study into File 13 on his way out the oval office door.

Disclaimer:  all stories in Bizarreville are fiction, even the ones that seem pretty darn real.