Instead of getting to the heart of the matter, instead of going for the jugular, these commentators try to put the entire subject on the level of the Whitewater scandal that plagued Clinton and never did go very far. Did President Bush engage in insider trading and help set up an offshore subsidiary in the Caymans when he was on the Board of Directors of Harken Energy Corporation? Did Dick Cheney engage in illegal practices when he headed Haliburton?

These are certainly worthwhile questions, and they should be answered instead of stonewalled or whitewashed, but they are not the major crimes of our government. They're merely stories of individuals we've elected, sad but not much different from Jim Trafficant's and Senator Torricelli's official misconduct.

If you want to get into the government's real crime, let's get into what the government calls "trust funds" and their double bookkeeping on budgets and the national debt, "on and off" budget receipts and expenditures, "Public Debt" and "Intragovernmental Holdings" or what was once called "Federal Debt." Here, we're dealing with real criminal fraud and corruption on a major scale, in the trillions.

In your face.

The feds don't hide their misdeeds, they just lie about them. The U.S. Treasury, the nation's bank, faithfully records almost everything to the penny. All anyone has to do is to look at the published records and stop listening to politicians or newshounds who deal in hearsay; i.e., what so-called investigative reporters are told by the crooks themselves.

By far, the trust fund scam is the worst. Almost forty percent of the total national debt is held by twenty entitlement trusts that haven't the slightest resemblance to real fiduciary accounts dealing with the stewardship of property. No resemblance to real trusts that, by their very nature, would already be "lock boxes" instead of debit black holes holding nothing but debt.

The entire "Intragovernmental Holdings" side of the national debt is fraudulent. It could be pulled out of the picture without the slightest repercussion to anyone except the Beltway Bandits who built and exploit it. That's $2.5 trillion of the national debt that could be eliminated tomorrow at a tremendous relief to citizens, their children, and their grandchildren.

If you want to talk about lost retirement money, offenses the President himself claims deserve jail time, then look at the 21.4 percent of the national debt held by the Social Security Trust Fund, now standing at $1.3 trillion owed and payable solely by increased future taxes. A trust fund that has never held anything but debt. A debit black hole account that is impossible to "raid" because there's nothing in it to raid, nothing but debt accrued by 141 million American workers that did nothing worse than giving the government surplus payroll taxes.

How did we get this debt? Why, we got it by giving the government money. If we had not given them surplus payroll taxes, we wouldn't have this debt hanging over our heads.

The feds take that extra payroll tax retirement money from every worker in the country, spend it elsewhere, and then pretending that they can both spend and save the same money they put UOU markers in the black hole account that they deliberately mislabeled as a "trust."

Oh, but this isn't the people's debt, they will tell you. It's money that the government owes itself. Money that one department owes another. Debt that can somehow be paid off with something other than taxpayer money. Despite what all the economists say about having to raise taxes when entitlements need money maybe Daddy Warbucks will come to life and pay it off or the government will just flood the market with some new currency they print up. Miracles happen you know. If they can change money into debt, then maybe they can change debt into money without collecting it from you. Have faith.

It just goes on and on. There is hardly a single thing you've been told about Social Security that you can believe from politicians, bureaucrats, think tanks, and watchdogs inside the Beltway of the District of Corruption. Even the chicken-little baby-boomer scare story is a hoax.

And what are we going to do about it?

On November 5, 2002, American citizens, the victims, are going to go to the polls and endorse this crime by continuing to play the game the same way they've been taught since childhood. We are going to put our stamp of approval on this criminal behavior by either re-electing the same crooks or selecting new ones who have already paid their dues and sworn allegiance to one of the political cults in order to be on the ballot. That's what has become of the "great experiment."