Supersize that stimulating plan for me, Mr. Obama

Not infrequently I start to think that, after all is said and done, we really are going to survive this wretched decade of Bushian devastation with our nation largely intact.

Then, a whole lot more promptly gets said, and, as becomes so dreadfully apparent, much more than previously thought needs to be done. And the reality of it all begins to swamp the hope.

The campaign season was a pleasant interlude of imaginary sniper fire and Palinesque absurdities and public reeducation sessions between a stern Joe Lieberman and doddering John McCain. Yes, those were the days -- days of enormously amusing distractions; but beneath them, my friends, were the bubbling and boiling of Bush's reality coming home to roost.

Just this morning, for instance, comes late Sunday night news of another little-guy bailout of another behemoth bank: Citigroup. "Once the nation’s largest and mightiest financial company," says this morning's New York Times, "Citigroup lost half its value in the stock market last week," hence Team Bush launched frantically into action to "[approve] a radical plan to stabilize Citigroup in an arrangement in which the government could soak up billions of dollars in losses."

How many billions? Oh, a bit more than 300 of them. But let us not fret, because, as the Times further reports, "Citigroup will shoulder losses on the first $29 billion" of its drowning portfolio, and after that, "any remaining losses will be split between Citigroup and the government."

Say, that's not so bad, that "split" thing, I mean. But then came that whopper of a dependent clause -- "with the bank absorbing 10 percent and the government absorbing 90 percent." In other words, we now pretty much own Citigroup, a belly-busted leviathan of Brooks Brothers stupidity.

And then, to top it all off, came the less than murky understatement: This "may set the precedent for other multibillion-dollar financial rescues." (Shhhh, don’t tell Detroit.)

Talk is now abundant -- and cheap -- about Barack Obama as FDR in his first 100 days. Doubtless, certain parallels can be drawn, but what my unsteady nerves cannot shake from historical fact is that Hoover, Coolidge and Harding didn't bequeath trillions and trillions in national debt to Mr. Roosevelt. He possessed the freedom of preceding and relative innocence; he was working from a blank slate and a comparatively healthy balance sheet. Which is to say, his deficit vistas were new and manageable.

Today, however, all the bright and cheery talk of a Keynesian stimulus package is darkened by the haunting reality of Bush and Reagan, no matter how aggressively those talking economists wish to shove that reality into the background. Because tomorrow is sooner than you think.

Our contemporary problems are not just a matter of paying for their solutions down the indeterminate road, since we're already paying interest on a grossly malicious $11 trillion in red ink racked up largely by two grossly ignorant presidents and their congressional accomplices.

And get this: The inexorable bad times hadn't even kicked in yet. No, no, the Boomers are just now queuing up for those other tens of trillions contractually promised, even as their fiduciary agents in Washington have been busy squandering those trillions on senseless wars and the boys at the yacht basin. And it's not as though the Boomers are entirely innocent victims, either. At minimal prodding from the reckless pols, they stuck their heads in the sand and frivolously believed in such childish things as free lunches. Oh yeah?

But now were told, Don't worry. Or, to be more precise about it, we're told we literally cannot afford to worry. Deficits be damned, as though that's a new way of thinking.

Within the span of only about a week, we've witnessed the desperate mothballing of Obama's $175 billion stimulus plan issued during that pleasant interlude of a campaign. Peanuts. Not nearly enough. Even conservative economists who once suckled at the ideological breasts of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are now unabashedly begging for a $300 billion shot in the arm, Obama is proposing far upward of that, and other economists are screaming for yet more.

And the hell of it is, we really can't afford to worry about it, even as we do -- because tomorrow really is, well, tomorrow, and all those overseas tankers filled with red ink just might finally pull into our stormy port and cash in their mixed-metaphorical chips. But even if they don't, there's that little matter of interest, swallowing, like the Cheshire cat, the federal budget.

Have a nice week.