Shining City Gazette has obtained a copy of a widely rumored
early version of the president’s State of the Union address that was drafted
for him by a team of his closest economic advisors.
Had this team of financial experts on and off hiatus from Wall
Street jobs not been stumped by a tricky lexical complication, the president
would have used his annual updating of Americans on where their country stands
as an opportunity to take the bold, transparent step of officially announcing
that Corporate America, by all measures currently available to modern science,
has now grown “too big to rail…at.”
In one line designed to get the country’s ostensible leaders
all standing and clapping, the president would have said to America, “If
they’re too big to fail, if they’re too big to jail, if they’re too big to
derail or curtail and too big even to veil, guess what folks, they’re too big
to rail…at.”
Said senior White House wordsmith Elizabeth Duncan, “The
problem was that in rehearsals the president just didn’t feel like he was
nailing the pause between the rhyme word and the preposition that had to go
with it.
“We tried switching out the “at” and putting in “against”,
and that didn’t work. We gave “sail…into” a try and really nobody was happy with
that. We racked our brains for days searching to no avail for a transitive verb
that rhymes with “fail” and “jail” and means to carp or snipe or sneer at or to
badmouth or nitpick or blame or dump on or even to whine about or disrespect or
insult.
“Sadly everyone on the team gave up and, well, you heard
what the president went with.
“As a footnote, though, in the eleventh and a half hour, a
White House intern majoring in English at Georgetown University told Tim
Geithner I think it was, or maybe Jeffrey Immelt or Peter Peterson. Come to
think of it, maybe it was Penny Pritzker. Or maybe Jamie Dimon. Anyway, the
point is, the intern told one of the president’s people that ‘assail’ or
‘bewail’ would work.
“By that time, sadly, the president had already put the last
bit of polish on his delivery of the back-up speech.”
“It’s too bad,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. “Now
we’re going to spend another year listening to 99 percent or so of the country
keep griping about Corporate America. If they’re so crazy about wasting their
time, why don’t they just complain about the weather or something else they
have no control over. OK, maybe the weather isn’t a great example anymore, but
you get the point.”
Said outgoing Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner, “It’s
time, as the president has repeatedly said, to look forward. It’s time for
America to finally just accept the plain and simple subtext of the president’s stand-in
State of the Union speech—that it’s their government’s mission now to put them
cradle to grave at the disposal of the job creators.”
In related SOTU news, the president also reportedly chose at
the last minute to postpone sharing the progress he’s made on creating a legal
framework for his killer drone program.
According to reports, the president’s evolving plan now is
to key the scope of the weaponry any given American has a right to own and
operate to the extensiveness of the background check he or she undergoes.
Said White House spokesman Jay Carney, after refusing to confirm
or deny that such a plan is in the works, “I’ll just say, that given the very
well known extent to which the president’s background has been checked and rechecked,
I can’t imagine a reason to deny the president any weapon on the planet or any
use of that weapon.”
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