Congressional Crises Prompts Britain to Offer U.S. Old Job Back as Colony

"Clearly she is not quite ready to manage on her own," observes Queen Elizabeth regarding U.S.A.

photo credit: Lindsey Armstrong

N THE WAKE of the U.S. government shutdown and debt-ceiling crises, Great Britain has made the unprecedented offer to invite the United States to return to its pre-Revolutionary War status as a colonial holding of Britain.

Queen Elizabeth, although a figurehead royal, was asked by Parliament to approve the measure as a formality. In her brief speech to the Houses of Parliament, she noted that the U.S. lacked the ability "to govern herself as a sovereign nation.

"Clearly, she is not quite ready to manage on her own," said the Queen.

"Therefore," she announced, "I hereby give my blessing to Britain's Parliament in their magnanimous offer to pull a struggling United States under the wing of Britannia, to apprentice her in the ways of governance until such time as she may take flight, a true nation at last."

Under terms of the re-colonization, Republicans would be required to take remedial classes on how to appropriate funds.

"In a republic, one does not appropriate funds and then shut down the government to prevent those funds from being spent," explained one MP.

"It's rather how things work when one is a sovereign nation with laws and a Treasury and the like," he added. "One must learn these fundamentals or one is rather a laughing stock around the world."

Democrats, for their part, would learn all about how proper diet and exercise can build strong bones, particularly in the spinal column.

"One does need fortitude if one is to lead one's party into the fray," the MP said. "Unfortunately, your 'Democrats,' as you call them, are rather limp and unsteady on their feet. This will never do if you wish to enjoy more than a one-party system."

CNN has promised wall-to-wall coverage of the story, except when it has to break in for wall-to-wall coverage of Marilyn Monroe's x-rays.