Mustachioed Iraq War cheerleader and capitalism-at-all-costs New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s latest op-ed, entitled “Are We Home Alone?” calls on government officials to act “larger than the moment,” to provide its ailing, apparently infantile country with “inspirational leadership.” The millionaire hack laments classically lamentable American mainstays like partisanship and politics as usual and the public’s distaste for the nightly news. He talks about the need to stop vilifying public figures and italicizes the words our country in a way that connotes those suicide-inducing “This is ouurrr country!” Chevy commercials. This guy even wants the Big O to deliver a fireside chat, F. Delano-style, to bolster the ol’ national spirit.

L. Friedman’s op-ed, in addition to being a blind rallying cry for Little Timmy Geithner’s zillion dollar toxic assets plan, calls for an end to the finger-pointing, the he-said she-said, the argument that this whole mess is “the other guy’s fault,” in favor of a more forward-looking, adulty discourse that yields a solution to the depression without vilifying anyone or assigning blame. The idea that this is no time for finger pointing is echoed by a growing number of public and private figures, including a (beloved) friend of mine as we watched Jon Stewart undress CNBC’s Jim Cramer on last Thursday’s Daily Show.

But isn’t now precisely the time to point fingers? Isn’t “don’t point fingers” the same line of shit Bush gave us as he buried more and more dollars and bodies into the Iraqi desert? Shouldn’t we be assigning blame to the money-addicted bankers who effectively led the American people, blindfolded and ignorant, to financial slaughter? Shouldn’t we point a long dirty digit toward the crooked conservative lawmakers who gutted, shredded and burned any preexisting regulatory measures that would have prevented these bankers from gambling billions like coked-out Atlantic City pimps on a Saturday night?

This isn’t time to be constructive. Why not wait to reconstruct the financial industry until we identify exactly who and what brought on its initial collapse?

Because what is going on now is complete and utter bull crap.

Right now, the same hackneyed gamblers who set us up for collapse are the ones reconstructing the financial sector. Hank Paulson, Geithner and their cronies are robbing the American taxpayers of trillions of dollars under the pretense that we have no f-ing idea how this shit works, and giving it to their buddies in the same mega-firms for which they used to work.

And here lies the center of the issue — we really don’t understand this stuff. We don’t speak that language. As Matt Taibbi put it in his recent Rolling Stone article, which is itself an example of the type of finger-pointing we need before we start dulling out taxpayer cash, “There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.”

This is what allows a relatively small group of I-bankers and hedge-fund d-bags to lord over us without so much as a peep out of the ignorant masses. We’ve been relegated back to the kiddie table, told to sit there and shut the fuck up while the grown-ups make the decisions. And while we’re sitting there, doodling absently, paralyzed by helplessness, tools like Thomas Friedman have the balls to call the very banks that gagged and raped the American people out of their hard-earned money, “our ailing banks.” What do you mean our banks? The former AEM majors who slither along in those banks are scheming as we speak, they’d slit your throat for a dime if a legislative loophole allowed it.

Don’t tell me to sacrifice for them. And don’t tell me to pinch my nose and swallow as the financial goons who control the Treasury shove bailout after bailout for their millionaire buddies down my throat. Real people need help out there but our government has been doped, hijacked by a gang of brainy thugs who dazzle and intimidate us with a complex language we don’t understand. They sit on a bottomless pit of cash reserved for only the rich, privileged high rollers who couldn’t keep their fat little fingers out of the cookie jar. And those fat millionaires whose greed brought us down remain in shadows because of the hard-assed myth that this isn’t time to point fingers.

In due time, these thugs will have their old companies back to full-health just in time to retake their old jobs and start the cycle all over again. And all the while we, the ignorant, breath a sigh of relief, only a few short years away from relapsed depression, our faces preparing the same expression of shocked wonderment when the shit once again hits the fan.