Finally!

I think the media is being too hard on McCain for chickening out of his upcoming debate.  Clearly, a man who – as Lehman Bros employees packed their personal belongings into archive boxes – recently proclaimed the “fundamentals of the economy are strong”, urgently needs to get caught up on a few decades worth of economic news. Let him have his emergency study leave, for Heaven’s sake. Better late than never.

While the hilarity of pitting McCain’s unique blend of temper tantrums, dementia and memorized talking points he doesn’t understand against Obama’s flamboyantly reasonable arguments appeals to me on some level, until now I was worried McCain actually thought he knew what he was doing, so I’m relieved at this tacit admission that he urgently needs to stop everything and get some lessons on the economy.

Even now I expect he is studiously following a Power Point presentation on the interplay of “supply and demand” in the free market he advocates. I remember (vaguely) how it works from my school days: The price of goods is determined by weighing how badly people want it against how much of it you have to sell. Several trillions of “dollars” worth of unrecoverable debt (for example) is a virtually unlimited supply of goods nobody in their right mind wants anything to do with. According to my 10th Grade Basic Business course, that means the price should be set at zero dollars or less. In fact, in a proper free market, people might actually be paid to take it away, as is the case with similarly valued products like human excrement.

There is bound to be more to the emergency training sessions than this, though. Like lengthy discussions regarding how Rebublicans can sell legislation that will compel American taxpayers (and their children and spouses) to fork over more than $2000 each to buy back their own excrement just because that’s what the shopkeeper says it’s worth.

Will the nebulous prospect of non-specific impending doom be enough to convince voters who are still considering voting Republican they should let the government force them to buy their poop back? Even though the problem is too complex to be summed up on a bumper sticker? And has nothing to do with queers, terrorists, guns or abortions?