RETURNED ABRAMOFF DONATIONS ERASE NATIONAL DEBT Lawmakers Scramble To Shed Trillions in Tainted Cash
Politicians in Washington hurried today to dump trillions of dollars worth of campaign donations from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, giving the money to the Treasury Department and all but wiping out the national debt. Congressmen, senators, and other politicians lined up around the block outside the Treasury building to give back their Abramoff riches, many of them carting piles of hundred-dollar bills in wheelbarrows. "We are processing the Abramoff money as quickly as we can," said Donna LeBrock, a window teller at the Treasury Department. "There's just so much more of it than we ever imagined." The unexpected windfall of tainted cash means that the national debt, long considered an albatross on the U.S. economy, has all but vanished for the first time in the nation's history. At a press conference at the White House, President Bush said that the sudden influx of returned donations from the disgraced lobbyist was proof that his economic policies were working. "Our program of receiving tainted political donations and then hurriedly returning them is finally paying off for the American people," Mr. Bush told reporters. At the Department of Health and Human Services, a spokesman said that some of the newly returned Abramoff cash would go to treat an epidemic of amnesia among politicians in Washington, many of whom can no longer remember meeting, speaking to, or having dinner with Jack Abramoff. Elsewhere, a marine who was arrested for not going to Vietnam forty years ago is expected to plead insanity, claiming that he was under the delusion that he was Vice President of the United States. -- Jim Devine "The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin
