"This reminds me of the Joker from the 1989 version of Batman, who says: 'I'm giving out free money.' You know the Joker, as shown on this chart. You have seen him. 'I'm giving out free money.' As we all know, money is not free. Unfortunately, the joke here has been--and will again be if we do not do something about it--on the American taxpayer." - Republican Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowasshole, on how a tax shelter provision in the auto bailout plan was reason enough to oppose it.
This is not about the merits of the argument. This is about the fact that a goddamn United States Senator brought out this picture on the floor of the Senate.
Leaving aside that Grassley's staff could have used Heath Ledger's Joker lighting piles of cash on fire, and leaving aside that, in the 1989 Batman, the Joker was using the cash to lure people into the streets so he could gas them to death, thus rendering the entire analogy nonsensical (unless Congress had a proviso that called for executing the heads of the bank and insurance companies that might have benefited from the Silo tax shelter - which, on the whole, is not a bad idea), let's just head into the weekend remembering this: the people who keep rolling over the Democrats in the Senate are fucking idiots who have degraded the rhetoric and the politics of the nation to score cheap points. Now, who comes off worse? The ones doing it or the ones letting them do it?
Video of Grassley's speech is available, about a minute and a half in.
