"We ain't got enough water," said Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, "git some."
Those words set in motion a bizarre chain of events that still have the people in places like Nebraska shaking their heads.
Georgia State Survey teams got out maps drawn prior to the 1796, when Georgia went from being a large prison to actual statehood.
A governor's aide pointed out, "Hey, we used to own half the damn country. Look at that map." "I'll bet you with the right priced judge we could annex Alabama, bamboozle Florida and Hell, nobody wants Tennessee."
The state boundary line today is marked by the Camak Stone, placed by University of Georgia professor James Camak at where he believed the Tennessee-Georgia-Alabama lines should meet. The irony that a Georgia citizen apparently denied the state a piece of the Tennessee river appears lost on the governor.
With the fervor of a traveling evangelist caught in a sorority panty raid, the Georgia Governor seized the moment and promptly annexed a disputed corner of the Alabama-Georgia State Line. He then set in motion a bigger plan.
"Fire up the ski-boats and green up the lawns, we have solved the water crisis," trumpeted Purdue, as truckloads of surveyors and corp engineers started dragging pump hoses to nearby rivers.
Alabama's national guard troops soon begged to differ and destroyed the massive pumps Georgia brought in to "use the water."
With the nation's full attention focused on Georgia's attempts at land grabbing, a national "tsk, tsk" could be heard from California to Maine.
"How can you be on the ocean and ever run out of water?" asked a grizzled farmer. "Haven't they heard of desalinization?"
When asked that question Governor Purdue responded, "Yeah, we've heard of it. But we can't afford that AND all the people we have in jail here. You know we were the first penal colony in the U.S. and keeping people in jail is something we do best. But, hell, that costs a lot."
"So what are you going to do about your water problems?" asked a reporter.
The governor responded, "This is all Bill Clinton's fault. If he hadn't been so busy playing with cigars he could have gotten the EPA off our backs. Then we wouldn't be paying these fines we pay for bad sewage treatment and could afford one of those "salt remover things."
When a reporter pointed out that the water Georgia wastes through bad sewage treatment could be recycled to meet the state's needs Purdue respond, "Do I piss in your beer? Don't tell me we can fix up dirty water… I want something clean and I want it now."
