Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

The "Now We're Double-Screwed,

“I pledge allegiance to the Fed
of the United Banks of America,
and to the Republicans who fucked us all
Ruination under Dubya, in the poor house,
With Liberty and Justice for sale.”

-- edition.

At the Mouse Circus, Hank "Lightfingers" Paulson popped up like Leonard Zelig on every show, in every advertisement and behind every camera. Hell, he delivered pizza to my house with a note pinned to the box to remind me (in case I hadn't heard him on the radio, or seen his skywriting, or downloaded his podcast) that this was the worst global crisis since the dinosaurs decided to cash in their asteroid insurance and use the money to buy Fotomat franchises.

He also charged me 7.3 million dollars for the pizza.

Proving once again that the act demanding money under threat of extinction -- money that will then be given to the very people who created the threat of extinction in the first place -- is only called “extortion” if you use a gun and ask for less than seven figures.

And is only called “Socialism” if you use tanks and ask for a few billion.

But if you use a television camera and ask for a trillion, it's wise fiscal policy and everyone should just shut the fuck up, jump on board the Free Market Unity Pony and stop pointing fingers at people.

It was, I admit, a hoot watching the guests and regulars celebrate Opposite Day on “This Week”.

Watching Republican Minority Leader and all-around towering hack John Boehner pretend to be a real public servant:

“…we need to rise above partisan politics and “behave like adults”.

Watching George Stephanopoulos pretend to be a real journalist:

But I know people who are going to want to know, when I was foreclosed on, when I lost my health insurance, the government told me to fuck off. That I was on my own. Now the banks come to Congress and its Now!Now!Now! Give them everything they want.

And watch the panel – which probably collectively lost several million of their hard-earned teevee dollars – picnic on the gothic, "Fall of the House of Freddie" weirdness of it all:

George Will: McCain has found his inner voice; it’s William Jennings Bryant.

George Will: McCain showed his personality this week, and it made some of us fearful.

George Will: When asked whether or not this is socialism, Secretary Paulson said “Not its not Socialism, its necessary.”

Sam Donaldson: To quote Hunter Thompson “ Fear and Loathing”.

George Will: Sam, the very people who told us there’s a cliff right ion front of us are the same people who told us that everything is fine and there is no crisis,

Cokie Roberts (so agitated that she forgot to preface her remarks with the “Some people say…”) figleaf: I’d like to see the CEOs of these companies marched down Wall Street in sackcloth and ashes.

George Will: Substituting vehemence for experience, McCain suggested firing someone.

Donna Brazile: It’s 700 billions dollars. If we do this, the next President won’t be able to do anything. No universal health care. Nothing.

Donna Brazile: We’re privatizing wealth and nationalizing the failure.

George Will: It’s trickle down misery.

Sam Donaldson: His [McCain’s] talking points have gotten all mixed up. I think the issue of age in on the table. McCain said 16 times on Monday that the fundamentals of the economy are strong.

But frankly, the whole Mouse Circus, as well as most of the media coverage of the last two weeks, can be covered quite sufficiently in six pictures.


Get your filthy regulations off of my Free Market

you damn, dirty Commie!



Selling bad paper to poor people and then re-selling it to each other will make us all Rich!

I am a fucking genius!




OK, what the hell

just happened?


I'm telling you, I'm broke.

Except for my 28 million dollar salary.
And my 67 million in company stocks.
And my eleven houses.
And the 1.1 billion in my portfolio.
Except for that, I'm b-r-o-k-e, broke.


So into the Big Media Subterfuge Centrifuge,

set the dial to "We-know-exactly-where-the-WMD-are-hidden", and presto....

Hello, Comrades!

IMHO, the only institution in America that is genuinely too important to be allowed to fail is the Middle Class. We are simultaneously the engine of prosperity, productivity and political stability, and yet decade after decade, Republicans (and far too many Democrats) have beaten us like a piñata and screwed us like a two dollar hooker for personal and political gain.

For generations, as the Middle Class has gotten fucked over -- has watched while our jobs were shipped overseas, our pensions were looted and our increased productivity was all shunted upward into skyrocketing CEO salaries -- we have been told it's too fucking bad but that’s just the way markets work.

But thanks for playing our game!

For generations, every effort to build and strengthen the Middle Class -- from Social Security to the G.I. Bill to fair labor laws to national health care -- has been rabidly derided, denounced and, whenever possible, sabotaged by the same class of Conservative plutocrats who are now queuing up to the public trough and demanding the Middle Class bail them out.

Bail them out again.

Rep. Marcy Kapture (D, Ohio)

nails it.

We have heard this rhetoric before, about another Republican debacle called the War on Terror.

Heard about how we needed to pass draconian legislation granting the Boy King sweeping, unprecedented powers Now!Now!Now! or the terrorists would kill your children.

Now we are told we need to pass draconian legislation granting the Boy King sweeping, unprecedented powers Now!Now!Now! or the Free Market will do something so unspeakable that John Boehner says on “This Week”:

“You can’t describe on a Sunday morning how bad this is.”

We have been told – as we have been told after every other Republican debacle – that no one could have anticipated it in advance, only to find out later there had been ample warning which our Dear Leaders simply chose to ignore.

We were told by sober men in very nice suits and expensive credentials that the cost of Iraq would be tiny, only to find that it would really cost us all we had.

Now, sober men in very nice suits and expensive credentials have revised their estimates of the cost of the bailout from “0 To $1 Trillion In 4 days Flat”.

We were told that terrorism was an “existential threat” to Western Civilization itself so dire that as a necessary expedient the Constitution would have to be shot in the head and dumped in a ditch and if you didn’t agree you were a traitor.

Then we were told not to worry our little heads about it. To go shopping. And every time another soldier, or another hundred soldiers, or another thousand soldiers lost limbs or live to defend George W. Bushes failed policies and massive ego, the moral vampires of the GOP like Mitch McConnell would smirk and sneer and say “they volunteered”.

Well tell you what, since no less of an authority than John Fucking Boehner has come right out and said this latest calamity is “the worst financial crisis the world has ever known”, before we declare economic martial law and hand over the equivalent of the Gross Nation Product of Spain to one guy who cal dole it out without any oversight whatsoever, this time I would like some volunteers.

This time, I propose a trade.

A very simple trade:

One limb = one million dollars.
One head = one billion dollars.

I am not proposing capital punishment, because I oppose capital punishment. I also never have and never would support mob action.

What I propose is a simple, voluntary quid pro quo.

After 30,000 men and women have been wounded in Iraq for a soldier’s pay in a war they didn’t cause, surely no one can say the Chairman of Lehman Bros’ arm – voluntarily offered and surgically removed under sterile conditions -- is too great a cost to bear to help save the world from a financial collapse he helped to create?

Surely no one could possibly argue that taking Phil Gramm’s head – voluntarily offered and decapitated very quickly and humanely – would be any more of a loss to humanity than any of the over 4,100 vital, young men and women with their whole lives ahead of them, who have died in George Bush’s Iraqi Debacle on our behalf?

Sorry, Republicans, but somewhere between the burning of Baghdad and the drowning of New Orleans you used up your reserve of “Trust me” for the next thousand years.

You're a Party of liars, looters and whores who have cried “Wolf!’ while you picked our pockets far too many times for anyone in their right mind to give you the unsupervised access to a gas-station shitter, much less the keys to the Treasury.

You are also the Party of bomb first, ask questions later. The Party of the Electric Chair. The Party of the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” school of criminal justice when it comes to poor and brown people.

Fine.

You tell me we are on the brink of Fannie Maegeddon, and I tell you that this time, flashing some scary adjectives and a sweaty brow on the Mouse Circus is not nearly enough.

This time, you don’t get to ship other people’s children off to be crippled or killed for your failed policies: this time, you have to do the bleeding and dying yourself.

Almost 2,500 years ago, a handful of Spartans were willing to stand against the Persian hordes at the Hot Gates and lay down their lives to save their nation from genuine disaster. And to this day --

Go tell the Spartans,
stranger passing by,
that here, obedient to their laws,
we lie.

-- they are still remembered.

I will believe we are in the “the worst financial crisis the world has ever known” when I see those that created it are willing to prove it to the Middle Class by offering to give up something more dear and permanent than one of their vacation homes.

When I see the silk-sleeved arms and pinstripe-clad legs of the captains of America’s financial industries stacked like Lincoln Logs on the Washington Mall, then I will believe the fate of the nation is at stake.

Until then, as far as I'm concerned, it’s just another hand of

Alaskan poker.