Which is more shocking, the hypocrisy of Wall Street bankers or the stupidity of our President?
When the good money is rolling in furiously and in amounts almost impossible to count, Wall Street types have no use for government regulation or oversight. It’s only when the bankers’ relentless greed turns south that they run to Daddy Fed with both arms extended. What a contrast to the distaste most banker-types feel for aid for displaced workers, single mothers, and people with mental problems; those folks must fend for themselves in order to build “self-reliance.” Heaven forbid the poor become dependent on taxpayer assistance!
Large-scale corporate welfare is hardly unusual, though government rescue of Big Business is always cloaked in the guise of keeping the economic system functioning for the good of the “nation.” We’re assured that a taxpayer bail-out is in the best interests of average people living in average towns, but we know better, don’t we?
If tough love and zero tolerance for failure are good enough for Average Jane, why isn’t it good enough for Bear Stearns or Indy Mac? What happened to all the happy talk about the self-regulating free market? Isn’t the All-Knowing Market God supposed to weed out the weak, the corrupt, and the inefficient?
Hypocrisy isn’t pretty and it can’t be papered over forever. Even a people as monumentally distracted as Americans will sooner or later see the beacon of truth shining through the fog.
Ah, and then there’s George W. Bush, our man-child Prez. What can you say about a man who is so out of touch with reality? You know we’re in deep doo-doo when our energy policy boils down to a bad Dr. Phil imitation: “By golly, if we want to lower gasoline prices we’ve got to change people’s psychology. We’ve got to drill and pump and refine – in the most environmentally friendly ways, of course – even though that won’t do a thing to lower the price of gas. But people’s psychology will be changed – and that’s what’s most important. Hee, hee, hee. Yessir!”
Is Bush serious? Change the psychology by drilling for crude that -- even if found and extracted -- will not be brought to market soon enough or in enough volume to alter the price at the pump by a penny? This is Bush’s plan to deal with the cold fact that Americans have lived beyond our energy means for decades? (Are you old enough, dear reader, to remember the political whupping Jimmy Carter took for calling the energy crisis of the late 70’s the “moral equivalent of war”?)
The Georgia peanut farmer must be laughing now.
On that beautiful day when W exits the White House for the final time, never, under any circumstances, to be invited back, Barack Obama will need a gaggle of shamans, Tibetan holy men, Buddhist monks, rabbis, and magicians, to cleanse Bush’s evil stench from the walls, carpets and furniture. It will be like trying to clean a cheap Hollywood SRO hotel room after the fire department carts the body of a chain smoker to the morgue. Obama’s team will need sage sticks the size of telephone poles to rid the White House of Bush’s essence.
When the story of George W. Bush is finally written it will be short and to the point: he failed at everything he attempted, and everything he touched turned to shit.
Amen.
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