President Bush to Send
Flood Victims 'Huck Finn' Rafts
June 26, 2008
Victims of the Mississippi River flood will receive thousands of makeshift tent-rafts, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Wednesday.
"I read about them in Huckleberry Finn," revealed a bubbly President George W. Bush at a Wednesday morning press conference.
"Huck rode down the Mississippi River on this raft-tent thingy," Bush said, "and I thought, 'that must be neat.'"
Accordingly, FEMA set about constructing thousands of "raft-tent thingies" out of wood and canvas to aid the Iowa, Indiana and Missouri farmlands that have sustained over $3 billion in flood damage.
"This was a lot cheaper than the other stuff we were going to do," said FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison.
Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama decried the measure as "deploribly inadequate, criminally neglegent, cruel" and 17 other adjectives.
His opponent, Senator John McCain, said, "Samuel Clemens is an American treasure and I think any plan based on his work is a practical one."
President Bush first took a liking to the works of Clemens during his first term.
"No, his name was Twain, Mark Twain. He was named after a riverboat term," said President Bush with a patronizing grin.
"I read Tom Sawyer in 2002 and 2003, and it was awesome!" said Bush. "I'm reading Huck Finn now, and it's a lot more serious."
By "reading," the president means that he's been making staffers read to him between meetings in the Oval Office.
"Condi won't do it anymore," said a sad-faced Bush of the Defense Secretary. "I kept giggling every time she said N-word Jim's name."
"We owned a 200-acre farm that's been washed away," said Ralph Hodgeson, who's now floating in and around the downtown of Cedar Rapids, Missouri with his wife, Martha, and their sole possesion- the tent-raft, "but this is a lot better."
"I'll admit, it makes me wish we'd done more for Katrina victims, but Twain didn't have a book about New Orleans," said President Bush. "Did he?"
