Who is a huckster and a sham?

CNN.com has an item that made me want to throw up when I read it. Apparently in the depth of financial crisis caused by nearly unbridled capitalism, readers are turning to Ayn Rand's fantasia Atlas Shrugged (either as comfort food or for answers, I don't know). It's bad enough to have to wade through Rand's horrific writing style and cardboard characters, but to have people take it seriously is an entirely new level of fail.

The Wall Street Journal opines:

"If only 'Atlas' were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster," Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore wrote in early January.

WTF? Has Moore not been paying attention to the last thirty years in which government became more and more Ayn Rand friendly, virtually recusing itself from any oversight of the economy? Yes...by doing more of the same, only more so...we will recover. If you're driving 100 MPH toward a cliff, all the better to drive 200 MPH. You get there quicker.

While the article does point out that Alan Greenspan, former chief of the Federal Reserve and architect of much of the monetary policy that led us down this rabbit hole, was a young Randian acolyte, it gives him too much credit for moving away from her absurd beliefs -- he did so only after the wheels had come off, the engine had blown, and he himself had bailed out of the car.

Atlas Shrugged should be viewed in the same way that anyone outside the white supremacist movement views The Turner Diaries: hogwash designed to perpetuate evil.