Always wear clean underwear

“Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?

YES!

How about a dollar?

What kind of a person do you think I am?

We have established what you are, madam. We are now merely haggling over the price."

This of course, was the famous George Bernard Shaw observation to his lovely dinner companion.

We are about to determine if Shaw’s observation can be stood on its head in America. Today or tomorrow our representatives in the halls of Congress – at least twelve of them – are going to be examined as if at the Pearly Gates to see if they are principled or if they are available for filthy lucre.

More than one hundred of our beloved republican representatives stood on principle earlier in the week and rejected the bailout of evil, greedy Wall Street – on, I repeat, principle and only principle.

What do we take these paragons for? Communists? Socialists? Populists? Not on your life, they are republicans and believers in freedom, liberty and the free market system. That is why when their president, ****** * ***, and their leaders called on them to vote for the bailout – and only partly because Nancy Pelosi said mean things about them – they voted `no’ with a vengeance.

Their leaders – after properly blaming that meany, Nancy - went back to the drawing board and re-crafted that unprincipled piece of legislation. As you know, re-crafting is shorthand for adding money to the bill for their favorite causes. It’s sort of like adding the earmarks that people like John McCain abhor.

Nancy and the even meaner Barney Frank are waiting for the these principled folk to carefully consider this great piece of legislation so that they may assure themselves that the bill has been re-crafted in a manner that will permit them to vote for it. It is said that Frank is going to install a jumbotron screen in the House Chamber with up to the minute market figures and futures from around the world scrolling for our fiends to weigh as they vote. He wouldn’t do that would he?

So, in the caucus of the House Republicans, those very same arguments in favor of ever smaller government and ever freer markets will be tossed around and examined from every conceivable angle to assure that no taint of communism, socialism, nationalization or any other evil word could be attached to the re-crafted bailout bill.

While cynics might opine that the only changes to the bill they voted against earlier is the addition of more and bigger government and greater spending, these principled beings who were not swayed earlier by rabid call from back home demanding that they remain true to their principles – because they always were - and who have since been inundated by even angrier demands from those watching from afar to pass the damned thing.

So as every car dealer, restaurateur, teachers’ union chief, financial advisor and 401(k) holder back home watches their own principled republican live on C-Span as he or she casts that very principled vote, there's really little to sweat for the truly principled. Right?

My only advice to each of these souls is to smile while they’re on Candid Camera for we’ll all know what to take them for.

And I ain’t b.sn’ ya.