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The Grifter Archipelago;

or, Why the Tea Party

Doesn't Matter

"Mr Chairman, delegates, and fellow citizens ."

The roar of the crowd is deafening Arms flailing spastically as the crowd pushes and shoves in violent excitement, I manage to scribble in my notebook: Place going absolutely apeshit?

It's September 3, 2008 I'm at the Xcel Center in St Paul, Minnesota, listening to the acceptance speech by the new Republican vice- presidential nominee, Sarah Palin The speech is the emotional climax of the entire 2008 presidential campaign, a campaign marked by bouts of rage and incoherent tribalism on both sides of the aisle After eighteen long months covering this dreary business, the whole campaign appears in my mind's eye as one long, protracted scratch-fight over Internet-fueled nonsense.

Like most reporters, I've had to expend all the energy I have just keeping track of who compared whom to Bob Dole, whose minister got caught griping about America on tape, who sent a picture of whom in African ceremonial garb to Matt Drudge and because of this I've made it all the way to this historic Palin speech tonight not having the faintest idea that within two weeks from this evening, the American economy will implode in the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression.

Like most Americans, I don't know a damn thing about high finance The rumblings of financial doom have been sounding for months now-the first half of 2008 had already seen the death of Bear Stearns, one of America's top five investment banks, and a second, Lehman Brothers, had lost 73 percent of its value in the first six months of the year and was less than two weeks away from a bankruptcy that would tr...