George W. Bush, who is commonly regarded as an idiot, addressed the nation on the radio yesterday: "If there were a way to make all the irresponsible Wall Street companies go bankrupt without affecting your families, I would do it. The rescue measures we are taking are aimed not at Wall Street, but at the streets where you live." here Why don’t I hear Dmitry Medvedev addressing the nation? Why doesn’t he point out that our own domestic companies are a pretty reckless bunch too? Why doesn’t he say: Sorry, citizens of the Russian Federation, that we first hurled a trillion of your hard-earned money into supporting confused, losing financiers. A fair number of whom are biiig crooks (here D. Medvedev would give the audience a sly wink). Understand the situation, citizens: we have to save the banking sector. Liquidity is needed. And also forgive us, dear people, that we are giving VEB (Vnesheconombank, the state development bank) 50 billion of your purest money so it can repay our corporations’ loans. Everything has gone to hell, and the corporations can’t pay back their debts. And so your hard-earned money will go toward patching up the hole left by buying, for fuck’s sake, football players, coaches, and clubs. (Here D. Medvedev would speak louder and louder, then break into a shout.) Toward the holes created by selling oil through the offshore company Gunvor. Toward the holes from Transneft’s strange charity. Toward Gazprom buying the Rutube website for some insane number of millions. Toward incompetent management at banks such as VTB. Toward endless corporate parties where managers, drunk on cognac, dance to the girl group Via Gra and their neckties fly up over their shoulders. And so on and so forth. (Here D. Medvedev would calm down again.) You, ordinary Russian people, most of whom live in poverty, will pay for all of this. But that’s just how it turned out. You see, it’s not that we are bad — it’s the global financial system that is bad. C’est la vie. But we are terribly ashamed. (After these words, D. Medvedev would stare at the floor for four seconds.) But there is no such address to the nation from President D. Medvedev. President Medvedev, unlike President Bush, is not going to call corporations irresponsible, even though many of those corporations are state-owned in President Medvedev’s case, unlike President Bush’s. Why is that? Could it be because ordinary Russian people don’t worry too much about their hard-earned money? Could it be that the best solution is the one from the classic writer: drag the cashier out of the booth by her hair and get your money back? By cashier, meaning President D. Medvedev and his whole gang. Maybe then they would get into the habit of somehow explaining and justifying their actions to a mass audience? Please consider this post extremism and incitement to rebellion.