Robert Stover, Alison Stewart David Charvet, Eric Holder, Cheney's indictment, Curious George, Don Wakamatsu, Werewolf Syndrome: I know what you want to talk about. But let's talk about something important. Do you think a car company that heavily marketed a gas-guzzling, ozone-depleting, obnoxiously large behemoth like the Hummer, which is rarely used by its buyers for its ostensible purpose – serious off-road driving – and which is, instead, an in-your-environmentalist-face status symbol for insecure women, overcompensating internally homophobic men, and assorted weasel-dicks, should be given a HANDOUT by your government?

Do you think the company that manufactured such an auto-atrocity, GM, along with its singularly corrupt fuddy-buddies at Chrysler and Ford, should be forgiven their steadfast and consistent RESISTANCE to even barely raising the fuel efficiency standards on their backwards-leaning fleets?

Should we save corporations who had U.S. government incentives as far back as 1975 to develop clean fuel-efficient cars, and have since then let their peers at Toyota and Honda race ahead to develop hybrid vehicles we all love (many of which will soon be built right here in the good ole USA)?

C’mon, people, let’s get beyond the bleeding heart jingoism here and see, with clear eyes, what BOTH parties are angling to do: bail out the most poorly managed, singularly dysfunctional group of companies in U.S. corporate history.

Just think about it. The Big Three Detroit automakers are asking for $50 billion today to keep them solvent. Is there any assurance in your mind that this Tripartite Band of Fools, who are bleeding billions of dollars a month, will suddenly overcome their chronic incompetence even with a bailout several times the size they are requesting? Is it not obvious that in six months time, after they’ve run through their existing $25 billion “loan,” and the $50 billion bailout, they will be back again begging for more government crack?

Does not common sense, at long last, dictate that we quit enabling these jackals and let them bloody well fail, so that more nimble players may take their place? Why are we suddenly putting a stop to the “creative destruction” that has served this country so well for so long?

Is it not palpably clear that the Big Three U.S. automakers are no different than the other corrupt, greedy, and incompetent knuckleheads we’ve recently bailed out – especially the arrogant pettifoggers at AIG and assorted Wall Street securities firms, who deserve to be pilloried in a public square and forced to fork out of their own pockets every single bonus check, perk, and dividend they’ve stolen from you and me over the last few months, as they live high on the hog off the big fat government teat?

Jesus Christ, people, are we going to sit here and take this crap like bloody sheep? I warned against any sort of bailout months ago. Now, as I predicted, we see the fruits of our indulgence: banks pocketing the money; not lending it to you and me; and barely lending it to each other. What’s more, traders and bankers continue to pay ridiculously high salaries and bonuses to their elite cadre of employees. Where is the sense in that? Where is the justice? Where is the humility?

Oh, you mean to say we did NOT demand, as a condition of receiving the $125 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), that these companies radically reduce salaries to the lowest possible levels as a condition of receiving our largesse? You mean to say, Senator, Congressman, Treasury Secretary, President!, that you did not demand the immediate elimination of every single perk, bonus, party, trip, manicure, massage, fox-hunting expedition, and assorted other indulgence, right down to free coffee in the company canteen, as a condition of your grotesque enabling? Is it not obvious, my friends, that we have been taken for a ride by ALL parties to this mess?

Oh, you say these vitally important financial sector employees will get up and leave if we don’t indulge their out-sized compensation structure? Are you kidding me? Where are they going to go? London? Dubai? Tokyo? Employment in those financial markets is far worse than here. Ask any Wall Street player. They know the party’s over, probably for good. They are merely trying to convince us that we need to play their compensation game a little longer. But the bluff is up, ladies.

Here’s the truth: WE NEVER NEEDED TO PAY IVY LEAGUE HISTORY MAJORS SEVEN FIGURES TO STAY IN THEIR CUSHY WALL STREET JOBS. Ask any insider: 50% of those employed on Wall Street are incidental. They add zero value. They aren’t testing bold new quantitative investment models or performing esoteric due diligence. They are, and will ever remain, expendable. If you paid these incidental employees low five figure salaries today, they would gladly stay put, so thankful would they be to keep a job in this climate.

We should also be unbowed before the specious rhetoric of Wall Street shills, such as King Michael the Bloomberg, who thinks so highly of his failed leadership that he is demanding we forego term limits to allow him more time to rescue his Wall Street cronies before they endure the wrath of working class and middle class New Yorkers they’ve pushed out of neighborhoods, mom and pop stores, and reasonably priced rental units. Bloomberg the Billionaire says New York City will suffer without Wall Street’s grossly inflated contribution to our commonweal. Maybe so. But it’s high time we drank the medicine. Manhattan has completely lost its soul in the face of grotesque high-end gentrification, fueled, in large part, by Wall Street excess. I am ready for a return to low-rent anarchy, and concomitant art in the streets, instead of a Chase Bank on every fourth corner. It’s a comeuppance long in coming.

Of course, like their pals on Wall Street, the big shots in Detroit are keenly aware of the nasty turn in the common man’s perception. They see the noose around their necks. And they have a plan to forestall Judgment Day. They are calling in every talk show chit and dialing every Congressman on their payroll. And they are doing what every failing company does when the chips are down: run lots of prominent and misleading advertising.

As on Wall Street, so in Detroit: the last refuge of the scoundrel is to play the economic populist. The Big Three knows they can’t convince you on the merits of their management or their shoddy oil-addicting products. The Big Three are down to asking for your money to protect the oft-hyped “three million jobs” that would be lost if they were allowed to fail. They’ve staved off rebellion by sucking autoworkers, the mainstream media, and assorted liberal Congresspersons into their gambit. Never mind that other car companies with strong Detroit bases, such as Toyota, Hyundai, and Nissan, would move into the vacuum to re-hire those directly or indirectly laid off by the Big Three. After all, the collapse of the Big Three does not mean Americans will stop driving cars. When Chrysler, Ford, and GM undergo their long-awaited, and wholly natural, death, other entrepreneurs will move into the breach. This is the American Way. And it works.

Do any of you mourn the demise of Eastern Airlines, Pan AM, or TWA? No way. Because other airlines picked up the slack. For all we know, there could be brand new American car companies, focused on the fuel-efficient cars we need right now, waiting for their moment to shine. We are delaying their arrival by keeping these dinosaurs on life support.

As for all you $50/hour UAW workers crying that you will not get the same obscene pay rates and benefits under a new financially responsible regime, well, it’s not like “the Detroit Three's” free-fall has suddenly come upon you. You’ve had decades to avail yourself of government-provided job retraining or, better yet, move away from that cesspool of arrogance and mediocrity. Is it our fault that you cast your lot with the makers of the Ford Pinto and the H2 Stretch Limo?

At the ripe age of 49, I don’t like change much either. I’d rather be writing for a print magazine, with a guaranteed circulation, a clear demarcation of church and state, and no need to self-promote every darn article. As someone who just wants to write, I don’t like that I have to learn about content management systems, social networking, HTML, Internet TV, Ad Sense, del.ico.us, Constant Contact, SEO, and all sorts of cutely named entities like dig, furl, reddit, and Squidoo. I’d like to go back in time when print magazines were king, and I was the cutting edge kid with a mobile magazine. But I can’t. I must evolve or die. And so must Detroit.

So, let’s cut the whining, and face the facts, can we?

The Big Three are not asking for our money because they need investment to keep pioneering fuel-efficient vehicles or non-fossil-fuel vehicles that might protect you and me from lung cancer, our children from asthma, our skies from smog, or our planet from overheating. They know they’ve ACTIVELY lobbied against such efforts for DECADES. Their token, underfunded, and deliberately un-supported attempts at greenwashing (those little “concept vehicles” they never intend to mass produce) are a joke. They know it. We know it.

And, if they suddenly acted like little Barry Commoners, and swore on Rachel Carson’s grave that they would use this precious dough to radically transform their SUV whorehouses into squeaky green car factories (as Mr. Obama naively believes he can convince these Stegosauruses to do), they will in time find their way out of the requirement. Hell, they managed to convince the government that the Hummer doesn’t need to list its fuel economy (it’s empirically below 10 MPG, by the way, not the 13 MPG that GM hypes) or otherwise comply with our egregiously lax CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) Standards. What’s more, they got the government to give business owners a bigger tax break if they bought a Hummer than if they bought an electric car! Surely with this track record as proof, they can wiggle out of whatever meager requirement Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid imposes on them.

It’s patently clear: there’s a foul smell emanating from Detroit. It’s the smell of sclerotic old men, living in old dead suburbs, who are constitutionally incapable of the far-sighted innovation this era requires. You look at these tired old suits at their tired old auto shows, trotting out their latest “snazzy” guzzlers, and you ask: HAVE THESE GUYS BEEN LIVING IN THE SAME COUNTRY AS US FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS? Jesus Christ, even Motown Records had the good sense to leave Detroit years ago. The place is home to the living corporate brain dead.

In an understatement of understatements, William Clay Ford Jr., great-grandson of the Ford Motor Company’s founder, Henry Ford, summed it up best: Detroit is “an insular town.” You’re bloody well right it is.

If we are to keep an automotive industry in this country, it needs to be moved out of the Michigan brain-ditch, and relocated somewhere like the Bay Area or Portland, Oregon, where at least some of the citizenry think in new and imaginative ways and with the survival of our planet at the foremost of their minds. The Big Three is a national embarrassment. They have been so for a very long time. And if Barack Obama is true to his bold new vision for America, he will let these fools go bankrupt, or risk bankrupting his own mandate right out of the starting gate.