PARIS, FRANCE– Historians at the Louvre were stunned this week by the discovery of a lost quote from Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile on St. Helena, containing a startlingly specific piece of military advice that seems to predate the $18 billion Minnesota Somali daycare fraud scandal by two centuries.
The French military leader’s quote, discovered scribbled in the margins of a battlefield journal, reads: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is opening a Somali daycare in Minnesota.”
“Napoleon understood that some mistakes are so massive, so brazenly absurd, that interfering only slows down the collapse,” said Dr. Pierre Marchand, a senior Napoleonic strategist. “If your opponent is currently billing a state government for feeding 10,000 nonexistent children in a broom closet, the last thing you want to do is send in the FBI too early. You let the invoices pile up until the enemy drowns in their own paperwork and Lamborghinis.”
Governor Tim Walz responded to the recent discovery by warning that stopping the scams would harm children, even when no actual children could be produced.
At press time, historians confirmed they were reviewing additional Napoleonic writings for other suspiciously relevant quotes, including:
- “An army marches on its stomach, but a shell company marches on a forged Excel spreadsheet.”
- “In politics, nonexistent children are not a handicap.”
- “There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and that step usually involves a ‘Quality Learing Center’ sign.”
