Even Better

So, driftglass has fucking nailed it. I wanted merely to throw the assholes who created this crisis in prison, but this is a much better proposal. I could get behind this 100%:

Well tell you what, since no less of an authority than John Fucking Boehner has come right out and said this latest calamity is “the worst financial crisis the world has ever known”, before we declare economic martial law and hand over the equivalent of the Gross Nation Product of Spain to one guy who can dole it out without any oversight whatsoever, this time I would like some volunteers.

This time, I propose a trade.

A very simple trade:

One limb = one million dollars.
One head = one billion dollars.

I am not proposing capital punishment, because I oppose capital punishment. I also never have and never would support mob action.

What I propose is a simple, voluntary quid pro quo.

After 30,000 men and women have been wounded in Iraq for a soldier’s pay in a war they didn’t cause, surely no one can say the Chairman of Lehman Bros’ arm – voluntarily offered and surgically removed under sterile conditions -- is too great a cost to bear to help save the world from a financial collapse he helped to create?

Surely no one could possibly argue that taking Phil Gramm’s head – voluntarily offered and decapitated very quickly and humanely – would be any more of a loss to humanity than any of the over 4,100 vital, young men and women with their whole lives ahead of them, who have died in George Bush’s Iraqi Debacle on our behalf?

Sorry, Republicans, but somewhere between the burning of Baghdad and the drowning of New Orleans you used up your reserve of “Trust me” for the next thousand years.

You're a Party of liars, looters and whores who have cried “Wolf!’ while you picked our pockets far too many times for anyone in their right mind to give you the unsupervised access to a gas-station shitter, much less the keys to the Treasury.

You are also the Party of bomb first, ask questions later. The Party of the Electric Chair. The Party of the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” school of criminal justice when it comes to poor and brown people.

Fine.

You tell me we are on the brink of Fannie Maegeddon, and I tell you that this time, flashing some scary adjectives and a sweaty brow on the Mouse Circus is not nearly enough.

This time, you don’t get to ship other people’s children off to be crippled or killed for your failed policies: this time, you have to do the bleeding and dying yourself.

Almost 2,500 years ago, a handful of Spartans were willing to stand against the Persian hordes at the Hot Gates and lay down their lives to save their nation from genuine disaster. And to this day --

Go tell the Spartans,
stranger passing by,
that here, obedient to their laws,
we lie.

-- they are still remembered.

I will believe we are in the “the worst financial crisis the world has ever known” when I see those that created it are willing to prove it to the Middle Class by offering to give up something more dear and permanent than one of their vacation homes.

When I see the silk-sleeved arms and pinstripe-clad legs of the captains of America’s financial industries stacked like Lincoln Logs on the Washington Mall, then I will believe the fate of the nation is at stake.

driftglass, you're my hero.