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LOCAL EDITORIAL

Things have, um, changed The Ant and the Grasshopper Thanks, Steve Redwine   Traditional Rendition   The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.  The grasshopper thinks the ant's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.  Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.  The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.   Modern American Version   Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.   CBS, NBC, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast.  How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?   Then a representative of the NAAGB (The National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on Nightline and charges the ant with "green bias" and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism.   Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings "It's not easy being green."   Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the CBS Evening News to tell a concerned Dan Rather that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Reagan summers, or as Bill refers to it, the Temperatures of the 80's.   Ted Kennedy exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the backs of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share."  Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act," retroactive to the beginning of the summer.   The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.   Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal moms who can only hear cases on Thursday's between 1:30 and 2:00 PM when there are no talk shows scheduled.  The ant loses the case.   The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he's in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him since he doesn't know how to maintain it.   The ant has disappeared in the snow.  And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.   Post Scripts:   The trouble with the Left is that it has come to see its basic constituency as the poor, and is determined to enlarge and solidify its constituency. --Paul Greenberg ---- If you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can be assured of Paul's help. --Bernard Shaw ---- If big government sparks a revolution in this country, who will win the war--ant or grasshopper? --Duke Freeman