Help Yourself - that should be the motto of the McCain campaign, in two senses. The first is an invitation to their fat cat cronies to belly up to the public trough and gorge themselves - as we have seen so often in the past seven years of this administration. Halliburton, KBR, the Katrina cleanup, the Wall Street mess, and the list goes on and on.
So Bush, Cheney, McCain and all their rich and powerful friends have been helping themselves at our expense for most of the last 30 years. But what about the second sense of the term? Help Yourself - as in, you're on your own. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Steely-eyed self-sufficiency. As long as you're among the underclasses, that is. If you're among the ruling elite and your greed and lack of foresight have caused the greatest economic disaster in this country since the Great Depression, then it's up to all of us to pony up a trillion dollars to keep our financial system from collapsing. And perhaps so that the CEOs can make a little more profit out of this calamity at the same time.
But with the latest resistance to the Big Bailout on the part of the Congress and people on the Left and the Right, maybe that motto is turning around. Maybe we're telling the McCain campaign to Help Yourself, in the second sense, because we're tired of all the Helping Yourself that's already happened.