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Crosscurrents

Will Durst: We're all Muppets

A few words here for all my fellow Muppets, referring to Greg Smith, formerly of Goldman Sachs, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times announcing he's out  of there due to his company’s extreme moral bankruptcy. According to Smith, associates are encouraged to rip off their own billion-dollar clients and regularly disparage them as Muppets.

I know. What a shocker. A big time brokerage firm with little or no conscience. My God. What's next? High school parties where beer is served? Airline food that tastes like hot, damp, glued-together bar coasters? Mitt Romney failing to speak like a real human?

Romney is a guy who keeps hyping his history as a private equity investment banker, so it’s easy to imagine him as just another tentacle of the vampire squid, wrapped so tightly in the “Me First,” and “Success at any Cost” culture that he squeaks money when he moves. On a daily basis, we see evidence on the campaign trail, as he does or says whatever he thinks it's going to take to win. “Pro-choice? I got your pro-choice. Oh wait, not pro-choice? Well, then neither am I.” Everything from talking about NFL-owner buddies to pretending he likes cheesy grits. Mitt, nothing personal, but if ever there were a non-cheesy-grits-eating kind of a dude, it’s you. 

Politicians even have a name for we Muppets. They call us low-information voters – people not paying too close of attention, who will believe anything, such as the 50 percent of Republicans in Mississippi and 45 percent in Alabama still calling President Obama a Muslim. And it wouldn't be surprising if a good number of them actually think he's made out of muslin, a loosely woven cotton fabric. It's only a matter of time before Karl Rove folds a spool of muslin into a ball, sticks his hand up it, and makes it say exactly what he thinks we low-information voters want to hear. Or did he already do that and call it Rush Limbaugh?

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Crosscurrents Elections
Outraged and outrageous, Durst is as current as today’s headlines, as accurate as a sniper, and universally acknowledged by even his peers as the nation’s foremost political comic.