Good Morning Middle America, your King of Simple News is once more revealing the truth, because you can stand it.

Have you ever played the game “Whack-A-Mole” at a fair or arcade? You have a big hammer and the nasty little moles jump up out of a number of holes and you try to whack them before they go back down.

As the game progresses, the moles jump up faster and faster and in multiple, until you simply can’t whack them quickly enough. Our government is playing Whack-A-Mole.

As they run over to rescue the banks that have popped up, an airline also pops up, and then an auto company, and then home owners, and then retail sales pop up, and then finally; tax payers pop up and revolt because they are the moles that are getting whacked.

If you wake up in the morning with a headache, it’s because the government was whacking you while you slept. They were conjuring up a new lethal brew of debt and taxation that will NEVER be paid; but they want you to try anyway. I hate it when they do that.

The bailouts of course won’t work for more reasons than I have space and time to write, but in short the failure will be due to the very real fact that they aren’t dealing with the actual problem. Our failing economy is not due to a lack of interest in shopping. Come on, this is America where “Combat Shopping” is bigger than the NFL.

The problem is also not due to a lack of credit to shop with. It’s due to the inability to pay the bills from lat year, which is due to not having jobs of sufficient compensation, which is due to the “Biggest Lie Ever Believed,” which is that exponential growth is mathematically impossible.

If a politician were to consider the very real possibility that we may well have reached the end of the proverbial rope for the false promise of growth, growth and more growth; that politician would also have to consider that his or her unselfish and devoted government service is toast. Giving due consideration to the above, the devoted servant says, “Can’t we come up with some sort of cockamamie bailout plan?”

My friend Dave Mitchell keeps threatening to write a piece for this blog titled “The Party’s Over.” Sort of a remake on sports commentator “Dandy Don” Meredith who used to sing, “Shut out the lights, the party’s over,” once a football game was hopelessly lost.

Dave believes that this may be the last great hurrah for the major parties as the hollow promises of the Democrats will ring as true as the hollow promises of the Republicans. If Dave is correct, it will prove that dreams really do come true for some of us.

In other news, George “Badlands” Bush, is conjuring up a plan to avoid the colossal airline delays during the coming Holiday Season. I can solve that one from here. Just give it a few more months and no one will be able to afford to fly. Problem solved. I’m not sure that this may not already be true as alert reader “Greg” pointed out yesterday.

Retailers are going to start Christmas sales early by trotting out special deals any time a customer actually shows up with money; and especially on electronics. Remember how they used to give away free turkeys with big purchases? Now if you buy a turkey, they throw in a 42″ plasma TV.

I also believe that if we wait long enough to shop, many retailers will give you stuff so that they don’t have to pay someone to move it when they vacate the malls. Like a civilian conservation corps of sorts.

Regardless of the price offered, buying things that you don’t absolutely need with money that you don’t absolutely have, is in the technical terms of economics, barn-broom dumb.

The traditional Christmas sport of “shop till you drop,” has come to a bitter end. Running that plastic compounding interest credit card through the scammers, I mean scanners, to purchase junk Chinese goods is grave yard dead.

2009 will be a very difficult year for those who let it be. Grab reality by the ears and hang on, it’s gonna be a ride and with the right planning and mindset, it could be downright enjoyable as you voluntarily simplify your life and sniff the roses for the first time.