Come on, I’m looking at the credit card statements, the current value of our house, the gas prices and the utility bills, and I’m thinking that if Mr. Bush wants us to contribute to the rescue efforts for Insurance and Banking, he should be sending a little our way, too. After all, we didn’t get into this situation by making ass-backwards investment decisions, and we don’t have well-padded portfolios and personal assets to fall back on, so don’t we deserve it even more? Oh, wait – maybe that’s what you need to have to qualify.

The way I see it, though, we’ve already paid enough to the “decision-makers”, and giving them more of our money instead of making them pay the consequences is so incredibly. . .gawd, there is no way to simply express the absolute depth of the asininity of this. This is like giving your kid a brand new Maserati to replace the Ferrari he trashed when he got drunk, drove it into a house, set it and the house on fire to cover it up, and said it had been stolen when he was found the next day passed out on the front lawn next to the smoking wreckage.

Make the company owners pony up for their own bailouts. Take it out of the pockets of the folks who stole it in the first place. Either that, or let’s be fair and use that money to bail out the people who were hurt by these companies in the first place. That’s not the real world, I know. In this world, we have an in-group that sneaks provisions into things like the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that make corporate bailouts an unprotestable, no-voting-needed automatic gimme. If McCain gets elected, with Phil Gramm in a position to get even more of this kind of one hand washes the other legislation put through, there’ll be more of the same.

These are the folks who are trying to convince us that the other guys are “elitist”. This little club that gets to take things away from other people, and keep all the good stuff for themselves. Well, at least they’re not the undesireable kind of elitist, whatever that’s supposed to be. Oh, wait – that would be the rest of us, complaining about footing the bill for their selfish, stupid, wasteful investment schemes. Those of us who will be paying the bailout billions, not receiving them.