Man, this whole Wall Street deal's a real downer, innit?  I hope you all know: whatever's going to happen is going to happen.  Let go and let GOP. 

After all, it's been in the works for awhile.  No matter who you believe, the roots of the current "crisis" go deep.  The right blames it on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, another way of saying it's not the rich white guys' fault, but the poor black guys'.  The left favors Reagan-era deregulation of banking and investment industries and diminished consumer protections as an explanation. 

Whoever you believe — and both sides speak roughly half the truth — here we are.  And isn't it a crashing bore? I have to admit, I love the shock and awe of it all.  As if it's this huge surprise that a patently illogical and unsustainable way of life couldn't go on forever.  Well, not for everyone, as it turns out.

It's not exactly kismet that the crash coincides with the end of the Bush era.  I don't think you need an advanced degree in economics to figure out that it's all gone pretty much to plan.  The bailout's been bumpy, but there will be one, more or less like the one that didn't pass. 

Given that the GOP is in disarray and didn't expect or care to win the upcoming election, things are looking up for them.  No one likes Congress, so the fact that they can't pass a bill doesn't change anything, although with Democrats in control they stand to lose most from the failure to do so, even if it's Republicans who are clogging up the works. 

Whenever it's a wash, victory goes to the GOP.  If Obama doesn't win the debate decisively, it's a victory for McCain.  It is inconceivable that Biden will not win the debate with Palin on substance, but unless Palin bombs on the scale of Admiral Stockdale in the '92 VP debate, it's a wash.

The GOP is just better at diminishing expectations.  The Reagan mantra — "Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem" — has built-in appeal even in prosperous times.  No one likes paying for government, even when they can afford to.  It starts to seem like a total rip-off when things are falling apart. 

The worse government gets the more Reagan's logic resonates.  Every failure of a government bureaucracy is confirmation of this dictum.  When you run for government office on promises to run the government into the ground, you don't need a team of brain surgeons — some TNT and wrecking ball will do the trick.

You may have noticed, Hope has disappeared from the menu at Chez Obama, too.  He's obviously cinched that hotly-contested wish-upon-a-star vote.  Now comes the hard part: convincing an America that's just stumbled into the street from the flaming wreckage of its bombed-out house, only to be hit by a Mack truck, mistaken for fresh roadkill by a pack of rabid dogs, ripped limb from limb, bones picked clean by vultures, and then ground to dust by a troop of circus elephants, that what it needs is a brain surgeon, not a proper Christian burial. 

The GOP has shown in its choice of Palin that it understands that sometimes the only solution for the problem of government is The Rapture.