I'll admit: When first I wrote this, I was pretty dang steamed.

An open letter to Keith Olbermann:

You, SIR:

I've long enjoyed your MSNBC "Countdown" program. In an age of counterintuitive, Fox-News twaddle, it is an oasis of pertinent conversation in the deep-cable Vast Wasteland. You and your contributors, like Jonathan Alter and Richard Wolffe, are insightful and incisive, blah, blah blah. Your perspective is (for the networks), refreshingly left-of-center, if a bit dogmatic (i.e., illegal immigration is a high-fiver, and Gaza... what Gaza?) "Countdown" seems tailor-made for upscale, bi-coastal tapas-bar revolutionaries. N'est pas?

However, your chronic, unexplained coverage of Right-wing flotsam is increasingly nettlesome. I realize you're hanging them out to dry, pulling the pin on a little party sabotage, putting these bozos in the driver's seat of the smoking, rattling GOP junker so they can drive it off a cliff. But it's all become too much.

Republicans are committing political suicide on their own, thank you. They don't need help from an Eastern Establishment knee-jerk liberal like Keith Olbermann! 

First it was Sarah Palin. You've hammered her for more than four months after the election. If you keep poking through her political panty drawer, she won't go away. And that needs to happen - sooner, rather than later. Now, I fully understand she has something of a following, and I've tooted the cheap cologne of her indefinable charisma myself. She's kinda... sexy... in a way. Her vice presidential campaign was... fulsome. Perky. (Hey... there's nothing wrong with heterosexuality - as long as you don't bring a gun along on the first date.)

Now you've transferred your microscopic obsessiveness to Rush Limbaugh. And that just about smacks the last egg on the front porch. For one thing, I can't savor the full flavor of Limbaugh's video oeuvre, since I don't have a wide-screen TV. And his neck. Those... quivering pseudo-chin... things! Terrifying. Terrifying.

You must let it go! Bush is gone. Football season is over. It may seem slack right now, but we're facing a Depression here. There's news out there! Live in the present.  

Yours, SIR!

Then... dammit the man goes and turns it all around. Last night, he opened with a clean, swift explanation of the derivatives mess, better and simpler in explanation than anything I've seen. And Henry Paulson: Harsh judgment awaits you, bitch!

This is the picture I'm walking away with... Imagine a little Aaron Copland music in the background - maybe even the whistled theme from "The Andy Griffith Show":

The simplest and most reliable paper clip, the familiar one made of spun wire we use today, was invented by an American, and manufactured throughout the capitalist West. People wanted this simple, disposable item just because it was so convenient; it made their lives a bit easier, so they bought it. Factories were built to make this device - cheaper than earlier designs. People who worked in the factories making paper clips bought socks, so factories sprang up to make those. All the workers and factory owners paid bills, some of them clipped together with paper clips.

And wealth was created.

This country's financial system was based on just that creation of wealth, and there was a time when this country gave the world, through this procedure, everything from affordable cars to the silicon chip that revolutionized computer design. You're reading this post because of that breakthrough, doubters.

We believed, rightly or wrongly, the future was limitless - we would some day travel to distant stars, or engineer time travel. We could explore the mystery, if not of the soul, then at least of the sole - cultivating and exploiting curious adoration of silly-priced shoes. 

But, beginning a couple of decades ago, this country began turning over its financial system to the financial sector itself, free of cumbersome rules that were our firewall against human greed. The financial sector realized that it was simpler, easier, and required a lot less effort and imagination to plunder wealth instead of making wealth. They bought off Capitol Hill to allow them an unregulated playing field, then they created complex systems of paper shuffling and a whole new set of "financial instruments" - like derivatives; they created speculative-investment "bubbles" that had little or no real value. That's when, as our own paychecks stagnated, we read breathless tales from the prattling financial media about hedge-fund managers making a billion dollars in an afternoon.

Somewhere - neither too hot or too cold, but just right - Bernie Madoff puffed a long Cohiba and stirred coco locos with a chubby forefinger. Good times, good times. 

But after awhile, there simply wasn't enough money anywhere to cover all these empty schemes, to keep these sneak-thieves in Dolce & Gabbana from selling toilet paper guaranteed with non-funded "default swaps". The bubbles burst, and a universe of creditors was left holding IOUs worth either a fraction of what they'd paid for them, or nothing at all.

Because corrupt politicians allowed the blending of commerical and investment banks, we can't allow the financial sector to completely crash, since if we do, we'll all suffer; they still handle the money in this country. So we're spending our tax money, and the futures of our offspring, to bail out these... con men. Scam artists, really. There's no difference between the approaches of high-finance looters and streetcorner shell-game shysters.

Except, maybe, the street guys are in cheaper duds. And you know going in where they're coming from.

That's almost like... honesty.