While America’s attention was riveted on hunting trophies and beautified pigs, Wall Street decided it was time to distract us with some melodrama of its own.  The recent financial meltdown was not the work of foreign enemies, though it may give them great comfort to learn how adept we have become at producing self-inflicted wounds.  All of a sudden, John McCain is a regulator who will protect us against the unrestricted free market he denies he ever advocated.  But who will protect us against John McCain and his running mate, who have replaced the now discredited financial derivative with an even better instrument of economic mass destruction, the budget neutral tax credit.

John McCain and Sarah Palin have spent much of the past few weeks attacking the greedy, corrupt villains behind the collapse of our financial markets. And there truly were some pretty shady characters involved in some very questionable financial dealings. But a crisis of this magnitude never is the fault of just a few rotten apples. What McCain and Palin can't seem to grasp is that environmental factors can turn honorable people into criminals and people of questionable morality into models of probity.

Shade the truth just a bit, do this over and over again, and the possibility of weapons of mass destruction becomes a certainty. Create financial instruments that no one really understands, add a little more risk with each derivative, and all of a sudden you've inoculated the entire financial system with a virulent strain of almost worthless paper. But John McCain and Sarah Palin are as wedded to their mistaken notion of free market economics as George Bush is to his war in Iraq. Out of political necessity, McCain and Palin may try to sound like they understand the need for government referees at a free market football game, but in the end they simply can't surrender their favorite theory to some stubborn little facts.