In Greek mythology, Sisyphus the king of Ephyra was punished for his deceitfulness by being condemned to roll an enormous rock to the top of a hill, watch it roll down the other side, and then roll it back up, FOREVER.

Sisyphus is alive and well, it turns out, only now he lives in the White House.

You may recall, Dear Reader, the loud complaints by rich guys living in tony suburbs that banks were “redlining,” i.e., refusing to lend in neighborhoods inhabited primarily by deadbeat bums of particuar ethnic compositions. In response, great humanitarians like Congressman Barney Frank blackmailed the banks into making mortgage loans to the deadbeats. Unsurprisingly (except to idiots like Alan Greenspan and Paul Krugman) the mortgage lending sector of the economy cratered in 2008 when the deadbeats quit paying. Reacting to this crisis, other great humanitarians like Chris Dodd allied themselves with Frank the Pudgy to ramrod a law through Congress now popularly known as the Dodd-Frank Bill, or Dodd-Frank for short.

Dodd-Frank is a typical new age regulatory pain in the butt, but that is not its great failing from the point of view of the Obamaniacs. No, no. Dodd-Frank incorporates the outrageous requirement that banks only give mortgage loans to folks who have the capacity to make their monthly mortgage payments.

Heresy!

The banks actually started to obey the law, with the result that the deadbeat bums could not get mortgage loans to purchase houses they could not afford. So a great cry went up in the land, with much weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and shrieks of racism/sexism/islamophobia/rich bastards/etcetera. which brings us to King Sisyphus.

Our masters in D.C. have now started screaming at the banks to make more loans to deadbeats. Again. Of course, they couch this demand in innocuous camoflage, such as “relax lending standards for the underserved.” The subtext of this message is, of course, “Lend money to the folks who vote overwhelmingly for us or we will indict you for showing some intelligence and tax you out of existence.”

So here we are again. The gummint, which has already flushed hundreds of billions of your tax dollars down the sewer of bank bailouts, is busily creating the next financial collapse. Of course, we don’t need to worry about that. Our Europhilic administration will just take a page from the Cyprus playbook and confiscate all our bank accounts to pay for the next bailout.

Fast forward to 2015. Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and everybody else will have consolidated into the Universal Bank, which is 123% owned by the Feds. The Federal Reserve, still run by Prince Professor Benjamin Bernanke, will permit you to download as much money as you wish from the website www.freemoneyfromtheidiots.com as long as you click on the button labelled “I agree to pay this back someday if I feel like it.” Homebuilders, now converted into indentured servants and forbidden on pain of death from withdrawing from the home-building business, will be required to accept your downloaded funds, and will be forbidden from selling any house at a price above that charged for the average house in 1947.

But you, Dear Reader, will continue to work hard, creating the wealth that will be immediately confiscated and given to the more deserving.

Welcome to Paradise.

The ventriloquist Jeff Dunham uses a dummy named Achmed the Dead Terrorist, who periodically leans toward the audience, bugs out his eyes, and screams “I keel you!”

Achmed is a piker.

For the last several weeks, we have been subjected to hysterical eruptions of genocidal bombast from the current Dear Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea to you). Kim Jong Un (Korean for “psychotic little shit”), repeatedly screams that he is preparing a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the United States, illustrating his point using YouTube visual aids which picture New York, Washington, or some  other den of iniquity like Austin, Texas, in flames. To give street cred to his shrieks, he is moving soldiers, missiles, and other military gear toward his borders.

Our fearless leaders, whose intelligence staffs managed to fail to warn them of 9-11, the Arab Spring (hah!), and other minor foreign hiccups, assure us that Mr. Kim does not possess the capability to drop The Big One on the U.S., this despite the fact that the DPRK has long range missiles, and plutonium bombs that fit in missiles. (These are the same guys who assured us that the North Koreans were abiding by their agreements not to develop nuclear weapons.)

The talking heads are divided on the reasons for Dear Leader’s behavior.

The optimists say that this is just the annual spring extortion exercise, foaming at the mouth to be followed by the whispering of sweet nothings into the Secretary of State’s ear to induce shipments of U.S. grown rice to be airlifted to the bellies of the DPRK Army, while the peasants continue to starve.

The pessimists say that Mr. Kim is not only immature but completely unhinged; accordingly, this is the countdown to Armageddon, and the pessimists are even now cowering beneath their desks.  I, on the other hand, have a much more credible explanation.

Kimchi intoxication.

Are you unfamiliar with kimchi, Dear Reader? Permit me to enlighten you.

Kimchi is a garnish that accompanies almost every Korean meal. It looks like purple cole slaw. When you take a forkful, it feels like the entire roof of your mouth has been removed using a dull file. You sweat, you writhe in agony, you attempt to strangle the waiter. These symptoms are indistinguishable from the behavior currently being exhibited by Mr. Kim.

Our approach so far to calming things down on the Korean peninsula has been to overfly the peninsula with B-52’s and B-2’s. Now, having noticed that this friendly gesture has not calmed Mr. Kim down one iota, the great minds of Washington have concluded that this approach is akin to attempting to calm a swarm of angry hornets by whacking their nest with a broom. So they have announced their intention to back off, counting on appeasement to work as well as it usually is expected to, although there has never been an instance of its working in the entire history of mankind (excuse me, personkind).

I have a better idea. We sneak a chef into the DPRK commissary to replace all the kimchi with vanila ice cream. Mr.Kim’s demeanor will suddenly soften. His army will stand down. His missiles will be beaten into plowshares. Everything will be great!

Potassium iodide, anyone?

The Pushtu President of the Afghans that we shoehorned into office accuses us of collaborating with the Taliban! The Mexican El Presidente demands that we ship his proto-wetbacks handbooks on how to squeeze welfare out of our taxpayers after they creep across the border! The Greeks and Cypriots march and scream that the IMF (which, face it, distributes OUR money to the incompetents of the world) should go away and not demand austerity, for example, that they should actually work more than fifteen minutes a day!

This is actually really great!

We are getting really good free advice: Yankee go home! What a neat idea! And it’s an idea that is going to catch on.

We got onto this international kick with Woodrow Wilson making the world safe for democracy (like in Tojo’s Japan, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Russia) and followed up with the post WWII reconstruction of Europe, the saving of Vietnam from the Commies, nation-building on the sand dunes of Iraq, etcetera, ad nauseum. And to top it all off, we instituted Free Trade with our friends like Mexico and China.

Now the entire international “order” is in free-fall, pinwheeling down an ever steepening slope like a gigantic snowball, picking up bodies on every rotation. When it finally hits bottom, squish!

But we still have time to avoid being squishees. We can become squishers!

Why are we buying all this junk from China? We have lots of crummy manufacturers right here at home! Put a 782% tariff on all goods and materials imported from China and see how fast our own swine will produce toys painted with lead and cyanide! See how quickly we can turn out toasters that burst into flame as soon as they are plugged in! We will have an explosion in manufacturing jobs and in jobs for physicians to treat the victims of our new industrial policy. And while we’re at it, let’s just default on all the bonds that Fu Manchu and his boys were dumb enough to buy from us! Not the bonds owned by OUR banks, or OUR folks, just the ones owned by furriners. When the international credit markets collapse. all the people we hate will starve. Good.

We also can pull our military home. Let the Germans have the Ramstein Airbase. They can lease it to Vladimir Putin, who can in turn use it to send troops and supplies to Bashar Assad.

We can pull out of Saudi Arabia, allowing the locals to continue with their quaint practice of chopping off each others’ appendages without interference, or even”tut-tut”ing. We can leave Afghanistan, allowing its denizens to resurrect their traditional form of polo, played with the heads of their defeated enemies. We can abandon Nigeria, leaving its inhabitants to their usual pastime of eating each other. We can leave the French to their diet of frogs, snails, and other garden pests.

And here at home, everything will be peachy. Our foreign policy will be greatly simplified. We ignore everybody else unless they threaten us. In that event, BLOOIE! We launch thermonuclear missiles at all and sundry, eliminating the threat. No boring peace talks. No dishonest diplomatic discussions. No American kids getting put in harm’s way so some egomaniacal politician can get his name in the history books.

That’s it! I will run for Malevolent Dictator!

Campaign conributions welcome.

That’s unusual advice. After all, the comic films always have titles like “Eat the Rich,” on the assumption that rich people are over-indulged, weak, and helpless before the united might of the virtuous poor.

What a crock.

First of all, how do you think the rich got rich? By being smarter and tougher than the useless poor, that’s how. Mess with the rich and you’re going to get major trouble. The Cypriots have just been forced by the Northern Euroweenies to confiscate 40% of the money deposited in their banks. Almost all of the money is owned by the Russians, primarily the Russian Mafia and the Russian apparatchiks (same thing, of course). Watch what happens. The army of the Volga is about to descend on the gnomes of Zurich and Madame Lagarde. Vladimir Putin is not about to play Mr. Nice Guy when his moolah is at risk. The Euroweenie armies are a pathetic joke – the Girl Scouts could defeat them. And we in the US are going to look up at the sky, whistle tunelessly, ignore our NATO obligations, and surreptitiously smirk while the Europeans get just what they deserve.

We are actually going to use the same technique with respect to the long-term unemployed right here in the good old US of A. Who are the long-term unemployed? Not terribly surprisingly, they are disproportionately represented among the old farts, say people between 50 and 106, to whom our economy has been paying exorbitant salaries for 30 years to prevent their rioting in the streets.

To a great extent, this is a self-correcting problem. When people get old enough, they die. This means that the period of long term unemployment for old folks has a natural cutoff. Accordingly, all we have to do is wait and the problem will correct itself. And we can help the situation along by allowing Medicare and Medicaid to collapse.

Especially Medicaid. Medicaid recipients have two wonderful properties that render them particularly appealing as screwees. First, they generally don’t vote, being either too sick or too degenerate to bother showing up at the polls. This desirable property is offset to some degree by the fact that their descendents, who are frequently better off than the codgers, have no intention of supporting the old folks themselves. Honor thy father and thy mother. Yeah, right. They’d rather make the Lexus or Beemer payments, so they vote enthusiastically  for any program that will shuffle the inconvenient oldsters more rapidly toward their destined roles as fertilizer or weiner filling.

Second, the Medicaidants don’t have any money! Knowledge is power? MONEY IS POWER! We can direct our vast monetary resources to subvert the popular media, painting Medicaid “clients” as parasites on society, irresponsible leeches who unreasoably resist their appopriate role as the silent downtrodden. How dare they!

So as our strategy unfolds, we will find ourselves in a society pleasantly lacking in poor and old detritus, our personal lives a rich harmony of fancy cars, great restaurants, crummy movies, and all the other things that make life worthwhile.

Of course, at some point we will be old and decrepit ourselves.

I try not to think about that.

You may be right that there are still a few occasions on which a hypocritical utterance is made and called for what it is. But the trend is down, down, down. These days, public and media figures don’t even bother to be hypocritical – they just act disgustingly, say outrageous things, and smile sweetly. To quote that great philosopher, Alfred E. Neuman, “What? Me worry?”

Consider Dennis Rodman, idol of NFL wannabees from inner city ghetto to inner city ghetto. He makes obscene amounts of money, not just because of his ability to toss a sphere through a fishing net hung from a peach basket analog, but because he is such a flaming jerk. Despite this, he can visit North Korea (a country with nearly as many incarcerated citizens as the current world record holder, the good old U. S. of A., and a level of poverty that makes Ethiopia look good), hobnob with a manifestly insane dictator, and not even try to make an excuse. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian circulate pornos of themselves.

And this attitude is coarsening public discourse into unrecognizability. Naughty words fill the airwaves. Scatological words [N.B. Strictly speaking, this term refers solely to expressions about bodily excrescences, but has come to cover all bad words.] fill children’s books. Sex education (formerly Hygiene) now includes pornographic movies and prophylactic demonstrations. Not a Bowdlerization in sight!

How can we return to the status quo ante? I think that an effective route would be to emulate our Puritan ancestors.

BRING BACK THE STOCKS!

We already have an excellent candidate to run the program: Michael Bloomberg. Hizzonner is already charging through the fields of sugared beverages, forcing fatties to slurp up their Big Gulps behnd the barn. He is forcing women who do not want to breast-feed the little vampires to hide their baby bottles inside their shirts in boob position. If you live in the Big Apple and aren’t a hypocrite, but have some independence of mind, you are heading for Big Trouble.

I can see it now. As we wake up for morning calisthenics in the street, a recording ot Hizzoner beating on a drum in the background, we can listen with great amusement to the wails of the miscreants, heads and hands immobilized, who have spent the preceding night shivering, breathing diesel exhaust fumes, and being covered in pigeon poop. Spend a night like that, buster, and you will pay homage to virtue for the rest of your life, no matter how much fun you have on the sly.

Of course, if the stocks don’t work, we can always bring back public hangings.