Alan Greenspan

- Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, presiding over U.S. monetary policy that helped create not one but two financial bubbles, the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble -- the first of which resulted in a stock market crash and massive layoffs, and the second of which resulted in an unprecedented global crisis!

- A firm believer in unfettered free markets -- and a staunch opponent of regulation that might have helped us avoid the current dramatic downturn!

- Kept interest rates low even as the housing market overheated, while going out of his way to downplay the potential danger of his policy!

- Now calls the crisis resulting from his policy "a once-in-a-century credit tsunami"!

- Dated Barbara Walters in the 1970s!

- An acolyte of "novelist" Ayn Rand -- whose philosophy, Objectivism, "was an extreme form of libertarianism that actually celebrated selfishness and greed"!

- Called "the Undertaker" by Rand -- not because she had foreknowledge that he'd preside over the destruction of the economy, but for his dour dress and demeanor!

- In October 2008, said he was "shocked" to discover that free markets might not always be good at regulating themselves!

- Supported Bush plan to privatize Social Security!

- Supported Bush tax cuts despite skyrocketing government spending!

- Played in a jazz band in college!

- Blamed by not one but two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, for destroying the economy!

- Recently compared by U.S. Representative John Yarmuth (D-KY) to Bill Buckner, the Red Sox first baseman who fumbled away certain victory for the Sox in the 1986 World Series by letting a ground ball hit by the Mets' Mookie Wilson dribble through his legs!

- Isn't it ironic, don' you think: For most of his career, known as "the Maestro"!

- Idiot!