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Once upon a time in a fairytale land that no longer exists there was a term applied politically that meant something. It was “Lame Duck.” What it referred to was an injured fowl which didn’t have the capability to function. What it was applied to was an elected official or a legislative body during that period of limbo from an election day until the first day of their term. The outgoing group was deemed unable to act. As Mark Twain or Will Rogers might have described it, they couldn’t do any more damage for at least a while. Your money and your property might be safe for the moment. In fact, it has become the practice that our typically do-nothing Congress simply takes the period off every four years and goes home to trim the Christmas tree, drink eggnog and moonshine, and pick up thick envelopes from favor-seeking constituents.

Now, we’ve got a not-so-lame duck flapping incessantly in Washington. They are on a mindless, pandering roll. Ducky-Lucky has listened to Chicken Little and Turkey-Lurkey and now is dealing with the falling sky by building huge columns of worthless currency to prop it up. These are the guys who were in maximum honking mode about a billion or two a month for a war against terror in the Middle East. Now, they’ve taken a $700 billion TARP (which really went out the showroom door at $850 B) and started discussing another $500 billion “stimulus” package, AKA welfare handout. They’ve had a couple of hundred billion for AIG, cherry-picked CitiBank, stiffed Fanny and Freddie, dissected Wachovia, decided to pick up a couple hundred thousand bad mortgages and now they are going to design some cars for us.

For a clear and concise discussion of where the US automakers problem came from, read this piece:

Why Yes, We're In the Union's Pocket

Did you get that? Given a free choice, Americans want SUVs, pickup trucks and large comfortable sedans. We’ve had the luxury of low cost fuel and we’ve got a nation with large distances and wide-open roads that work well for those vehicles. Sell what the public wants and make profits. At a buck and a half a gallon for gas, I think the market could surge!

But Congress, knowing better and being beholden to enviro-whackos and unions, says we must build vehicles with high gas mileage to balance these cars Americans want. Auto-makers, you must meet a corporate average fuel economy (CAFÉ) which is unrealistic across all the vehicles which you build. So, build econo-boxes which don’t sell in large numbers because we want to go green. And, don’t build them where the people will buy them like Europe or Asia. Build them in the US where union workers will have jobs. Can that sort of policy bring anything but business failure? Have you ever seen one of those SMART cars on a US highway? Would you send your teenager to high school in one? Would they go?

Well, there are two sides to every story, so here’s a “Community Opinion” writer from the Dallas Morning Worker, writing about the poor US union worker and those nasty little imports that aren’t really imported, but are built right here in the US of A:

It's the Fault o' Them Imports

Remember as you read his whining, that when he says “American automaker” he means the Detroit Big Three bankruptcy cartel. And when he says imports, he means successful global companies building cars in America.

I’m getting that 1984 feeling again.