Fresh Horses for My Dems!

We’ve had a rough ride during the past week.

On Monday our stock market fell 500 points. Later that day, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin checked under her bed to make sure she had plenty of dry goods stockpiled, in case the Rapture starts early and Republicans head en masse for the haven of Alaska. She also gave the National Guard orders to turn back Democrats and other heathens at the state line.

Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain struck a stately pose and pointed out that the “Fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

On Tuesday President Bush appeared in the Rose Garden to reassure us there was no reason to panic. He stared into the teleprompter, apparently noticed someone wearing an Obama button (insert your own plausible explanation here if you don’t like mine), got miffed and stalked back into the White House without delivering his soothing recommendation to gas up and go shopping at WalMart.

Later that day Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain struck another stately pose and said, with the stern voice of conviction, that he opposed any bailout of insurance giant AIG.

On Wednesday Republican Presidential candidate John McCain reversed his career-long position in favor of Deregulation, explaining we need more regulation to stop Obama from ruining the economy. Then he said that if he were President he would fire Colonel Sanders, the CEO of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Hmmm... does the Deregulation McCain previously supported permit dead mascots to hold CEO positions?

Later that day McCain struck another stately pose (he has three, unless he is campaigning with Palin, in which case he has none) and said, with the stern voice of conviction, that he supported the newly announced bailout of insurance giant AIG.

On Thursday my cable and Internet crashed. Mustering every ounce of intellectual strength to stave off a paranoid fear that Patriot Act goons were trying to silence the righteous howl of my blog, I popped open a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse and downed it with a box of Christmas truffles I found in the back of my freezer, figuring it was as good a time as any to write a poem about elitism, or at least to get drunk. “McCain has nine houses, not seven,” I wrote. “Obama lived on food stamps and organized the poor in heaven,” I continued. Realizing I was a better drunk than a poet, I passed out.

On Friday morning I awoke to find that my cable was back up, that President Bush has proposed we bail out the stock market with taxpayer funds we don’t have and aren’t likely to pull out of our asses any time soon, and that the stock market was soaring in joyous appreciation. Brokers scampered like geckos up their skyscraper walls to windows they had jumped from earlier in the week, chanting, “Greed is Good.” Well, what would YOU do if your neighbors took up a collection and paid off your credit card debt, your mortgage and your car loans, then dropped that pesky lawsuit against you for stealing Social Security checks from their mailboxes?

Now it’s Monday again.

The dust is settling from last week’s stock market crash (Adjustment, my portfolio!) and the bailout, in the morning sunlight, doesn’t look nearly as good as when we dragged it home from the bar over the weekend. It looks tired and old, like something we’ve seen before… remember the Patriot Act? This, too, was hastily crafted to meet an emergency, and Congress was so pressured to pass it that many didn’t read its provisions.

Now Bush is pressuring Congress to “act urgently” again, and greenlight a bailout that is sloppier than an unwanted sexual advance from Bill O’Reilly: It would give the Bush administration the authority to spend $700 BILLION on the bailout, plus economic intervention powers so sweeping that they have no precedent in U.S. history. The Treasury would be empowered to act unilaterally. No court or administrative body could review its decisions, and once the “emergency legislation” is approved, Bush could raise the $700 Billion by methods not subject to Congress’ traditional power of the purse.

Somewhere in the plan, there probably is also a no-bid contract waiting to be assigned to Haliburton.

So, what strategic watering hole should we head for now?

Should we say, “No!” to the bailout, creating another battlefront in our contentious Presidential race?

Should we make room in the Presidential debate for those who believe the financial crisis was staged, much as they think 9-11 was staged, to distract us from the real issues of the economy, the war and the economy?

Should we fake a heart attack for Joe Biden so he can gracefully resign his candidacy, clearing a path for Hillary to arrive in shining armor on a white steed and save us? (Anyone who can guess the number of friends who have suggested exactly that will win my Bear-Stearns stock.)

Induce a collective medical coma that will last until the morning of November 5, leaving strict instructions to revive us only for President Obama’s acceptance speech? Failing that, should we donate our bodies to medical research in another country, since science will no longer be funded in a McCain/Palin America?

No. Those are loser moves.

Instead, we should stop pretending this isn’t a fight to the death for the freedoms we cherish, because that’s exactly what it is, and devote our time to phone banking, registering new voters, volunteering to drive shut-ins to the polls, and generally behaving like winners.

Innkeeper! Fresh horses for my Dems!