At least people are paying attention, I suppose…

NEW YORK – “Bailout” and “change” were crowned on Monday as the words of 2008 after a year in which a huge financial crisis hit the United States and Barack Obama celebrated a historic victory as the first U.S. black president.
 
Merriam-Webster Inc., the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary, said “bailout” — meaning “a rescue from financial distress” — was the word that received the highest intensity of lookups over the shortest period of time.

John Morse, publisher of Merriam-Webster Inc., said this was not surprising given that the word ubiquitously featured in discussions of the presidency and fiscal policy.

He said the presidential campaign also produced voluminous hits for words like “vet,” which ranked second in the 2008 list, “bipartisan,” “misogyny,” and the word used to describe both candidates on the Republican ticket, “maverick.”

He said one of biggest event-related words of the year was “socialism” which came third in the list of the 10 top lookup requests.

Courtesy of Reuters.

I still think that the government might have angered fewer people if they had simply renamed their proposal to something like the “Save the Children Act of 2008″.  Then, nearly every member of Congress would have never even read the legislation.  They would have all been cheerleaders for it and lambasted those who actually took the time to read the bill.

This way, the media wouldn’t have picked up on the story, and John Q. Public wouldn’t be so upset about corporate executives receiving billions of their taxpayer dollars.  All Congress needs is a better P.R. campaign to make us entirely ignorant of their theft policies.

Rob from the poor and give to the rich seems like an interesting plot for a movie… maybe starring a mysterious figure who runs around the woods in tights…