..."The economy began going south at Warp 6. People started losing their jobs in an economy that John McCain insists is still fundamentally sound. All those tangled webs of high finance and low morals started unraveling. A few of the biggest gamblers went bust, and Uncle Sam stepped in. A few even bigger institutions such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, private corporations with some government backing, had to be taken over by Uncle Sam.

And so it was that panic set in and the economic forecasts began to sound like the weather forecasts for Galveston Island a couple of weeks ago.

Now the same Republicans who sat back cashing campaign checks from Wall Street fat cats for seven plus years and busily deregulated everything in sight, including those who'd watched over everything from baby milk powder to brightly colored lead-painted toys to pet food, want to use our money to rescue the robber barons.

If we don't go along, and pronto, they say, the Second Great Depression is right around the corner, and don't bother blaming them, because they at least tried to save us from themselves.

If you needed any further evidence that there's something rotten at the heart of this deal, just look at the Wall Street lobbyists circling around the rescue bill like so many ravenous wolves.

We the people and our national treasury are going to buy all those bad mortgages out of the portfolios of the guilty and the innocent alike. We're going to have to pay some of them to maintain that property, auction off that property and hold the money earned from the auctions.

The wolves smell blood and they smell money, and we the people are supposed to rescue them and make them whole and forgive them and, oh yes, let them make more money in the process.

If you're ready to buy this deal from a used war salesman like George W. Bush and his cronies on Wall Street, then I have a real deal for you on a bridge to nowhere.

Trust us, they say. In a pig's ass, I say."

Joe Galloway, McClatchey Newspapers