On Choosing Lunacy

I'm absorbing the financial crisis and the bailout it has precipitated. The latter seems almost perfectly designed to get our attention off the former and, more specifically, off those who brought this situation upon us.

What has me fascinated and appalled is that we are permitting/expecting the people who caused the problem to engineer its solution.

This has to be the height of lunacy. Those people should be looking at jailtime on a charge of, at the very least, gross negligence. I can think of several other charges but unfortunately no laws exist to nail them for anything! What they did, they did publicly(except for the profiting) and we did not notice. Those who should have warned us didn't, spoke too softly, or were told hush hush! There was no person or group specifically designated to a position of accountable oversight to scream STOP!.
What we got was total failure from across the entire government.

When this mess is resolved make no mistake, the solution, if it appears, will be painful and destructive to the nation. It is already. Just listen to the world speaking...and acting. Months ago I mentioned that the era of the Pax Americana was over. Ha! the era of America as a major power may well be over!

All of this is happening as Barney Franks, Chris Dodd, Charlie Shumer and the others who engineered the faulty lending process, and pressured the brokers into issuing these high risk mortgages, are engineering the solution that we will have to live with.

This is nuts, folks. This is downright crazy. Have they demonstrated insight into the problem, financial know-how, adequate brainpower? C'mon, they got us here by lacking all of the above and having instead only powerful needs for political and financial support for themselves.

I want them gone. I want them out of office. And I sincerely hope the voters of New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts will, for this one important occasion, slip the traces of their party loyalties and kick the bastards out!

Beyond that, the Republicans in the House, motivated by thousands of calls and e-mails from constituents, are trying to work out something a little more palatable. But haste makes mistakes almost inevitable, and they are being pushed by threats of imminent financial Armegeddon.

I wish them luck and time enough to get it right!