WASHINGTON – Greek officials were left to anguish over what might have been today after failing to finalize a promising agreement that would have canceled one third of the country’s obligations under a proposed 750 billion-euro rescue package for the failed socialist state.

The United States had been increasingly vocal with concerns about its $54 billion exposure to the loan. That’s when a young staffer with the Federal Reserve had what she later described as an “Aha! Moment” during an IMF meeting in Washington.

“Suddenly I remembered I had a CliffsNotes copy of Plato’s ‘Republic’ in my Hermès white crocodile handbag,” she recalled. “I had just bought the Plato thingy for one of my boyfriends who is cramming for his finals. Anyhow, I was thinking Plato was Greek and we’re a Republic, so maybe WE owe THEM something!”

“Hermès sounds Greek, too,” she added. “Is it?”

Officials huddled together after the interruption, and consensus quickly built that Greece should, in fact, be credited with contributing such building blocks of modern society as democracy, the Hippocratic Oath and columnar architecture.

“We were quickly able to go back and develop a retroactive, pro forma credit to the Greeks for inventing, for example, sophistry and Ouzo,” said Jean Paul Canard de Mallard, acting managing director of financial handouts for the IMF. “We had to adjust for inflation, of course, and so we came up with, conveniently enough, a sum that exactly totaled 250 billion Euros, which is the IMF’s commitment in the bailout.”

Is John Stamos really enough to negate Plato?

But the agreement was short lived. When confronted with de Mallard’s calculations, a member of the American negotiating team, Ekrem Kaplan, reminded the gathering of more recent Greek offerings to Western culture that had had “devastating effects.”

“John Stamos, for example,” Kaplan pointed out, referring to the former World Mullet Champion and 80s heartthrob actor from television’s distasteful “Full House” sitcom that consisted of poorly crafted one-liners followed by slack-jawed reaction shots of power-toddler-duo the Olsen Twins.

Kaplan said he approximated the damage inflicted by Stamos on Western culture to be “roughly in the Hurricane Katrina range, or just under $90 billion.”

“But that quickly became a moot point when we adjusted for Arianna Huffington,” Kalan said. Huffington [née Arianna Stassinopoulos] is the sluggish-tongued liberal pundit who ascended from the bowels of the blogosphere and successfully installed herself as a fixture on left-leaning talk shows.

Huffington is rated an “8″ on the Chris Matthews Leg Quiver scale, a globally acknowledged indicator of liberal morosis.

“Once Arianna was entered into the equation, further valuation became moot,” said Kaplan. “We could bring up additional abominations like Jimmy the Greek, Michael Dukakis, and George Stephanopoulos, but we didn’t want to actually add to the amount the Greek nation will owe the IMF, so at that point we agreed to call it a wash and just proceed with the conventional bailout loan.”

“Loans are just another way for our financial overlords to quench their thirst for the workers’ blood,” observed Yannis Panagopoulos, chairman of the Greek labor union that effectively sets the country’s policy. “I’m talking about the kind of loans that you have to pay back, of course. If you don’t have to pay them back, then we’re ok with them, which is why we were so hopeful about this deal to finally credit Greece for the gifts it has given to Western Civilization.”

“In fact,” continued Panagopoulos, “we were so open to it, we were prepared to stop setting pregnant bank workers on fire if it were signed. Unfortunately, now it appears we’ll have no choice but to once again make these minions of the bourgeoisie estate the outlet of our righteous anger.

“Imagine expecting someone to wait until age 40 to retire with full benefits! That’s not austerity, that’s depravity – that’s something far worse than John Stamos has ever done.”

Originally posted 2010-05-12 19:05:57. Republished by Blog Post Promoter