The more rational part of me didn't want to believe that the 2008 financial crisis was engineered by the Illuminati and its puppet Bush regime as a parting gift to the incoming socialist apparatchiks. Yet nagging suspicions remained, particularly with regard to the impeccable timing and the resulting political fallout that elevated even lesser, poorly crafted and expendable marionettes of mass distraction like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck to the national stage, imparting folk hero status no less.

I read books (House of Cards, a look at the personalities and the gamesmanship, and Too Big to Fail, a relatively sterile AP stylebook chronicle of events with some looks behind the scenes based on contemporaneous emails and notes), in hopes of understanding what happened. These books sort of answer what happened, but, for me at least, didn't pin down the "how" or "why."

A more cynical person might long ago have concluded that the disaster was engineered as one last frat boy raid on the Treasury liquor cabinet before the cops came to shut down the party. So that would be the "why." But the question remains: How? Who pushed what little red button to activate what weapon of mass financial destruction as they ran out the back door?

This article may be the final piece of the puzzle, or at least provide clues between the lines.

Meanwhile, the Masters of the Universe have retreated to the caves (which for some are corner offices at the Treasury and the Federal Reserve), waiting for the political carpet bombing response that never came. The marionettes, strings once connecting them to the Invisible Hand severed, continue twitching and flailing about on stage with reflexive muscle memory. And disaster victims gather in places like Nashville to idolize the marionettes and deify the "free market" grifters who wiped out their 401Ks.

OK, then.

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