Bin Laden a long time ago said he was going to bankrupt our nation, and with all the chaos that’s been going on with oil and housing and food and all these things.

Bin Laden did say he wanted to bankrupt America. This is before 9/11, I believe, and he hoped that 9/11 would do it. He hoped that taking down the World Trade Center would do it. They had some other plans, too, that went awry. But Bin Laden did, I think, also suggest that he hoped to be able to get the worldwide oil price up to $144 a barrel, which it has been.

The oil price dropped like eight bucks instantly today, started creeping back up. But nevertheless, this stuff happening in the United States right now, is not happening because of Osama Bin Laden.

This is the problem with it. It’s a very complicated thing. I read an analogy today that perhaps is a good illustration of what happens.

Take a water supply for a city, for example, and let’s say somebody very slowly but surely starts poisoning it, not enough for it to be noticed any time soon, but the poison continues to build up and build up and build up, and finally a bunch of people start getting sick.

That is what’s happened here.

The government, because of unbridled growth and tampering with free markets, with things like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and insuring mortgages and lending money to people or directing money be lent to people who couldn’t pay it back, what’s happening is that a financial system has been poisoned.

The problem is that just as when the water supply of the fictional city has been poisoned what people didn’t do then was go, “Okay, who put the poison in here?”

What they did was blame the water.

Right now people are blaming our system rather than figuring out and understanding why the hell this happened.

This happened because the government got involved, government grows, government knows no limits, government knows no bounds, and we have been papering over credit problems for years and years and years and pretending that we didn’t have them, and now all of a sudden a lot of institutions that we thought were solid and had assets backing their worth, don’t. And we don’t have the money in this country to put every American in a 3,000-square-foot house.

Bob Casey, Senator from Pennsylvania, before a Senate committee with the fed chairman today read a letter he got from a constituent named Tammy May. She is a working mother, a single mother with two kids, and she wanted Casey to re-prioritize things: House first, day care second, gasoline third, food fourth.

Note what’s not on there.

No climate change. No global warming. No health care. No Iraq war.

We can’t put everybody in a 3,000-square-foot house in this country and pay their electricity and pay everything else and yet the government has sought to make people think that’s what the government is there for because people in government want to get elected, they want people’s votes.

So the financial system here, the analogy is flawed a little bit, but it’s been poisoned and right now we’re not looking at who poisoned it, we’re blaming the system. There’s nothing wrong with the system. It’s like campaign finance reform, McCain said, “The system is corrupting us, we are good politicians.”

No. The system is fine. People corrupt themselves. The system doesn’t reach out and corrupt anybody.