El Loco Rides into Town, Guns Blazing

I admit it: I'm totally transfixed by the utter lunacy that has seized our country's political and financial spheres. So, where are we now...?

John McCain seems to have come unhinged. Here's a man who based his entire campaign on his claim to superior experience and judgment. So what does he do? He picks Britney's Mom as his vice-presidential running mate, then realizes that she seems like an absolute dingbat whenever she opens her mouth, so puts her in a bag to shut her up, but she still sticks her head out once in a while to utter something incoherent and preposterous. Then comes the financial melt down, about which he has no clue. First he says things are really fine, but when it becomes obvious they're not, he says the situation is so bad that he must suspend his campaign to go Save the Country. So he doesn't really suspend his campaign, but threatens no-show at the presidential debate and then ditches Letterman because he has to fly to Washington immediately to Save the Country. But he doesn't actually fly to Washington, but rather goes across Manhattan to do an interview with Katie Couric, who has just taped an interview with Britney's Mom revealing her once again to be more suitable for a "Jaywalking" segment on Leno than national office.

The next morning, Obama proposes that they both issue a joint statement of principles for solving the financial crisis to try to calm things down, but Crazy John won't take the call. Instead he issues his own sky-is-falling announcement and says he will fly to Washington to Take Charge of the congressional negotiations on the bail-out and Save the Country. Meanwhile, the congressional negotiations had been going pretty well because people who actually knew shit were dealing with the issues, and they had reshaped the Paulson give-me-all-your-money-or-you-die plan into something close to a plan that might actually work. But then Dubya (remember him?), in a last ditch effort to seem like a real president, summons everyone to the White House.

They all show up, but then everything goes to hell, because the white trash wing of the Republican party decides to rebel against their own administration and the president-whose-name-cannot-be-spoken by coming up with their own apeshit proposal because, by God, they ain't going to give no money to them arugula-munching Wall Street types who got us into this mess. Folks, this is more or less the equivalent of a ghetto riot where people decide to get even with the people who have been screwing them by burning down their own neighborhood.

And where is Crazy John on all this? We don't know.

Just in case you're wondering about the new Republican proposal, here are a couple of its key points that really caught my eye:
--Insure all mortgage-backed securities with a Treasury-designed system charging the holders of these (largely junk) assets premiums to finance the system, rather than using tax dollars.
--"Draw private capital into the market by removing regulatory and tax barriers...currently blocking private capital formation."
(The whole thing was in today's NYT.)

Huh? Let's see if I got this straight... The financial institutions that are foundering because they're holding billions in junk mortgage securities would save themselves by pouring money into an yet non-existent self-financing insurance company?? But these companies don't have enough capital to stay afloat as it is (which is the basic problem), so where would the premium money come from? But the second idea about "removing regulatory and tax barriers" is what really got me. Isn't that really what caused this crisis in the first place? Jesus wept.

Can't wait to see if El Loco shows up for the debate tonight.