Three card monte and the Long Con
Most young men at some time or another run across a guy playing three card monte. Ten minutes later, broke, and a little wiser, they move on.
I grew up on the other side of that classic short con, watching people I was related to hustle marks at lightning speed, separate the fresh scrubbed rube from his cash. Most of the people I knew were straight short con men, and I despised them, despise them still.
Most people, on having fallen victim to a short con, will gather that little bit of hard earned wisdom and carry it with them, a shield against falling prey to broke folks who loiter at truck stops in need of “Just enough cash to buy gas to get me home” or whatever. Sadly, the most cynical mark will fall easy prey to a long con.
To anyone who doesn’t know, a long con is a complex and carefully orchestrated piece of theater involving sometimes several operatives, whose actions and attitude draw the mark in, make him believe their game is the real thing, and lower the boom so fully and completely the mark may find himself not even in posession of the clothes on his back. “The Sting” was an example of the Long Con. For others, see “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, or “The Grifters”. The long con is a time honored tradition of the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth.
And that is the face of our elected leadership today, my friends. Pascal reminds me of the Freon debacle. Car companies were informed that they had to eliminate production of R12 refrigerant years ago, and did, at great cost and annoyance to their customers. And it turned out not to be the disaster it was supposed to be (remember the hole in the ozone layer, and how we were all gonna die? Seems just a bad memory now, right? But we have a whole passel of new regulations because of it)
That, my friends, was a long con.
Pro Choice? Long con.
Global warming? Long con.
Financial crisis? Long con.
I see this shit. I can spot a game of three card monte a hundred miles away, and I can see a long con when I’m looking at one, and I’m looking at a lot. And it’s not just my pocket that’s being picked, it’s yours too.
Let’s look at this from a common sense standpoint, shall we?
Banks lent money on homes.
Those homes were worth money.
The bank still holds the paper on those homes.
The homes, even devalued, will still return (as mortgage payments) far more than the value of the loan, even in a bad market
The gummint will make that money now.
Braak Osama will not spend that money paying bills. He will use it to create more entitlement programs for people who don’t deserve them, and the people who created the “financial crisis” we see now will once again collect fat paychecks for administering those programs.
Follow the queen. See the queen?
The only way to win is not to play.
Damn good way of putting it. What will it take to close the show?
Pascal
I respectfully submit that pruning the tree of liberty might be a good start … or at the very least napalming the house and senate … *oh, did I say that last part out loud*
The con men are allowed to return to their roost, with potential rotation of some every couple of years or so. Yet the same wolfs get sent back to the henhouse. Sigh … and so the con goes ever on and on.
Well, the bailout went down. Even my generally useless representative Blumenauer voted against it.
Now we can get down to the serious prospect of indicting Dodd and Frank and Pelosi (because she needs to be institutionalized, but not in the House).
Speaking of the short con…
There’s a rest area on I-5 in Oregon, a little ways south of Eugene.
I was heading down south at the end of May, and there was a woman there with a sign that said she was leaving her abusive husband and needed gas money to get away.
…
I stopped there again at the end of June.
She was still there – I guess gas was even more expensive than I’d realized!
(This has confirmed my long-held belief that I should never give anyone money for a sob story, unless it’s an entertaining one, such that they earned my pocket change.)
Enforcing vagrancy laws would go a long way toward stopping the short con.
Oh, wait. We don’t have vagrancy laws anymore.