This entire nation is truly caught up in the grip of the quadrennial Olympic Spirit. Even the U.S. Senate and Congress have been caught up in an Olympian-like spirit as evidenced by the soaring Olympian imbecility permeating many familiar-sounding competitions and events.
Ski Jump: Great leaps of unprecedented failures and lapses of common sense.
Downhill: Tremendous dizzying rush downhill in the “Race to the Bottom,” culturally, morally, intellectually and economically.
Slalom: Racing at breakneck speed downhill (always downhill) dodging every present and imminent issue in race to reelection.
Uphill Racing: Proposed by U.S. Director of Budget Deficits. Still under international Olympic Committee consideration.
Figure Skating: Musical score is played backward rendering performance incomprehensible and meaningless to the uninitiated.
Snow Board Badminton: Another new event conceived by an American, the Minister of Trade and Industrial Demise. Delayed in implementation while weighing the practical implications of an uphill, downhill or level playing field.
Curling: Campaigning on skates while pushing a leaden stillborn diversionary program along on the ice.
Skating Relay/Budget Deficit Relay: Each country’s team is handicapped with a full printout of the nation’s budget and trade deficits or surplus, hand-carried in a sturdy leather briefcase and handed off at each lap completion to next runner.
Speed Skating on Thin Ice: Don’t have the details. Involves Truth in Lending and Spending.
Hockey: Players armed with moronic clichés and metaphors as they take to the ice waving proudly an American-looking plastic imported flag, sporting the very latest imported banners, uniforms, equipment, pucks and sticks delivered by an imported van. But at least the Olympic IDs were made in the U.S. … No, actually you can get IDs cheaper and faster from Mexico.
TEME U.S.A. — Team Emergency Monitoring and Explanation: Teams compete on skis, locate disasters and with investigative committees attempt to find the greatest number of specific institutional response failures and the greatest number of finger-pointings for culpability. Final score is sum total discerned disaster failures and number of culpable designates.
Biathlon: Team racing and shooting. One skier is rifleman and one is a quail decoy. While skiing cross-country for time, decoys jump out and attempt to simultaneously draw and dodge fire of opposing racing teams. The number of pellets lodged in the opponent is subtracted as seconds from total elapsed time for the final score.
Budget Deficit 10K Relay: Every $10 billion in budget and/or trade deficits represents one minute of penalty time added to the total relay time. If you can justify the deficits to the judges, they may at their discretion either deduct $5 billion or disqualify you depending on the absurdity of the equivocation.
Two-Man Bobsled: Weight being a positive factor, rear passenger, brake man, uses printout of the “earmarks” (pork added to, but absolutely unrelated to, legislation) from the latest highway bill (about $14,000) for ballast.
The Olympic Games overlap a major holiday, and so constituents celebrate Presidents’ Day and Washington’s birthday in the now time-honored tradition of running out and partaking of the annual nationwide foreign imported car Presidents’ Day sale. The administration will host a gala ball. Performing will be the Capitol PAC Rats. The speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader as always will lead with their wives in the signature “Pork Barrel Polka.”
— By Sven Franklin, excerpted from “Poor Rustan’s Almanak.”
Rustan Swenson
Shoreham