There’s a big elephant in the room we call America, and it’s making me a little uneasy. Although I joked recently that a monkey would be the perfect mascot for the American voter, it had never struck me until today how appropriate the GOP’s mascot is if you can pause and view the nation as one big dysfunctional family. After one of the most self-righteous and elitist administrations of my lifetime gutted the economy and destabilized the world in general with their clearly ill-conceived agenda, we now have to listen to former Bush buttboys like Karl Rove implying that the BP spill in the gulf is somehow “Obama’s Katrina”, as if a man-made and Bush-enabled catastrophe can somehow be compared to a hurricane and a shockingly inept and profoundly unqualified FEMA director. And this is just the most recent glaring example of the self-deceit of a typical GOP supporter these days. Don’t get me wrong, I hardly define myself as a Democrat; what makes me even crazier is that this kind of self-delusion seems to cross all party lines when it comes to economics. Have you noticed that as huge segments of the global economy skid into the ditch, what mostly is going on is that people in general and the media in particular keep acting like somehow the trillions in imaginary money that the world is loaning itself is somehow going to materialize later in some magic fairy bank of the future? To me it feels like the global economy is a cartoon character that just skidded off a cliff and hasn’t fallen into the abyss because it hasn’t looked down yet.