The Bush administration has never been shy about their willingness to trample on principle to achieve their goals. Whether waging war in Iraq, jailing Alabama’s governor, pissing on habeus corpus, unraveling the Geneva Conventions, awarding no-bid contracts to the VP’s company, laughing in the face of congressional subpeonas, pushing aside responsibility for the most catastrophic attack on American soil in 60 years or simply shooting a friend in the face, Bushies have acted with aplomb and swagger. Their strategy–– one that has served them quite well–– has been to walk in swinging their balls, consummate alphas daring the betas to try and stop them. For the most part, it has gone off without a hitch, leaving reasonable thinkers stupefied and chronically under the impression that it couldn’t get worse.

But now, a few months from the end, having already lined their cronies’ pockets and advanced the conservative pigskin farther upfield than even Dick Cheney could have dreamed, W has unveiled his masterpiece, a heist so vast in scope and audacity that it makes Danny Ocean look like Virgil Starkwell. Forget the Wall Street honchos’ sweetheart deals... Recycling his Iraq Eve speech without even a hint of embarrassment, Bush came to us last week and asked that we hand him the ultimate golden parachute: a trillion dollars, courtesy of the US taxpayers, to be payed in one lump sum, immediately and administered blindly by he and Henry Paulson (he who stands to lose some half a billion dollars held in a supposedly ‘blind’ trust)... or else. This is Carly Fiorina on steroids... a Halliburton Grande to the Nth degree. The Dumbest Guy In The Room is asking for his bonus as he steps down as CEO of the White House Inc., for the last eight years the corporatist equivalent of the Playboy Mansion.

To be sure, Americans are hurting in ways they have not hurt since the swinging ’70’s. But lost in the Main Street versus Wall Street debate is the Pennsylvania Avenue factor. Anyone who thinks that Dear Leader’s figures on the national debt and deficit reflect the true reality of our economy has been asleep or unwilling to believe their own eyes for the past few years. Iraq and Afghanistan are not part of the whopping $400b deficit that awaits President X or Y in January, not to mention the pile of IOU’s that Bush has added to in the Social Security Trust. (Yeah... that ‘lockbox’ we loved to laugh at in 2000 looks awfully good right now, huh?) Add to this the probability that even Henry Paulson and George Cheney have lost track of the economic bodies they’ve buried in the back yard, and you start to get a sense of how far down the bottom might be.

Beyond their sheer incompetence and hutzpah lies the Administration’s reckless contempt for the middle class. Bush has ushered in an era where monthly health care costs frequently exceed mortgage payments and fuel costs dwarf the astronomical price of feeding a family. In this topsy-turvy paradigm, the stock market has long been dismembered from the economy at large. The sleight of hand that was passed off as deregulation coupled with pumped up free market capitalism have wrought Katrina-grade havoc on a system that had long held–– if somewhat tenuously–– to a guiding American principle of growing a middle class, even if only to create a consumer class. Interspersed with Bush’s lack of candor and command of basic facts have been wrongheaded outbursts of government-by-threat-level that seem perfectly scripted to provide additional chapters for future versions of The Shock Doctrine.

The difference between a hustler and a thief is that the hustler lines your own feelings up against you with the facts in plain sight, while a thief leads you away from the facts until your own instincts have been debased. Until 2001, the president’s job in times of crisis had been to lead and reassure. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ridge and, yes, even Colin Powell made a decision to pounce on insecurity and use pre-existing fears to cram ideology down our throats. On repeated occasions, Bush has shown us his desperation by raising the threat level, and rhetoric to match, in order to get his way on FISA, Iraq, tax cuts, energy policy, the 2004 election (!) and, now, the greatest heist in American history. If the hustler’s cool is long gone as we watch Bush contort and sweat, threaten and beg–– at times literally on bended knee (see Paulson addressing House Democrats this past Friday)–– then how is it that we find ourselves and our congressional representatives bending over backwards to kiss a proven liar’s ring. There is not only ample, but overwhelming ‘expert testimony’ from economists across the ideological spectrum that contradicts the media-packaged narrative surrounding the bailout. There have been dozens of smart ideas floated by progressives and even the odd conservative that could deodorize this deal and put the relief where the hurt is, not only in the boardroom, but in the family room. But when Congress was handed a perfect opportunity to call Bush and Co. on their phony red alert and raise them some good old common sense, they caved. So, instead of bankruptcy reform, necessary regulation, foreclosure moratoriums and a surtax on multi-million dollar paydays, we get a bad bill that will exacerbate the problem by blowing the deficit to dizzying heights, rebuking even the most basic of free market principles and lining golden pockets in the name of avoiding a crisis that has ben amplified for the sake of election year politics.

Since Chicken Little squawked, the sky has not fallen, and, had we taken this moment to collect our thoughts and devise a Brand New Deal, chances are we could have avoided the collapse that will follow excessive national debt, a harsh middle-class squeeze, the halt of Chinese-US interbank lending, oil prices and our general lack of national conviction when it comes to sacrifice and progress. It is too easy to be disgusted by the national embarrassment that is George Bush. For now, there are three things we can do... write your representative and beg them vote ‘Please, for the love of God, vote Fuck NO!’ on the bailout, hope that it is not too late to fix this on January 20th, and tip our hat one last time to Bush’s Balls.  Mission accomplished.