In an odd exposé that has left the worlds of politics and academia abuzz, a local homeless person revealed yesterday that he only blamed himself for his failures. The incident occurred near the dumpster behind the Shop Rite store in Brooklyn, when Willard Kookish, formerly of 435 Subprime Lane in Nutly, NJ, casually told a reporter that "my problems are my own fault." The veteran New York Times reporter Ken McLiar, who has been searching area dumpsters for a 3,785-part series on people who are homeless due to the evils of American capitalism, admits he was astonished by Mr. Kookish's bizarre confession. When asked to elaborate, Mr. Kookish went on to say, "I went through college drinking and smoking dope and never learned anything. I've had many job opportunities but didn't bother to show up. My family left me a nice house to live in but I took out home equity loans on it and spent the money on hookers and gambling. When the housing boom collapsed I lost everything. I made bad decisions and here I am bearing the consequences."

The startling revelation has left many in the community troubled by what it may portend for society at large. "It should be illegal to talk like that", said Marge Stumpko, an angered low-wage waitress from Lower Skunkworks, NY. "Aren't we all our brother's keepers? Is that all you're leaving for my tip, turdface?"

Floyd Grabbuck, a community organizer from Chicago, furiously described Mr. Kookish's statement as "un-American and downright traitorous," suggesting that "If that ungrateful rat-bastard doesn't like how we do things in this country, maybe he should move to a place like Russia where the government doesn't care for its subjects and see how he likes it there."

Eddie Fuppish, a mismarked ballot corrector from Franken, Minnesota, sounded more conciliatory: "The poor man needs help. Anybody that takes responsibility for his own actions is certifiably insane. Just look at all the big businesses selling you stuff for money. Don't tell me you are in control of your own spending or anything else for that matter. You're not. That's why I vote Democratic and make sure other people do the same, even if they didn't mark their ballots that way. It's the right thing to do. People need to be protected."

Experts, on whom the incompetent depend to explain the complicated world they fail to understand, are unanimous. "It's Reagan's fault," says Professor Wilton Chumpley, a consulting sociologist from the University of Twerp in Belgium. "Remember how in the 1980s that actor-president mislead people into thinking they could spend their own money and run their own lives without expert help? And then you had that crackpot economist Milton Friedman falsely claiming that the government shouldn't be responsible for directing people's existence. It made less sense than the UFO stories, at least for smart people like myself. But, tragically, some fools took it seriously; it ruined their lives."

President Obama has not commented publicly on the controversy but has privately told aides that "former President Bush is not getting off the hook for the economy, the War in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina or Willard Kookish's failures on my watch." Sources speculate that Kookish's mortgage default will be added to the list of indictable offenses against former Bush Administration officials.

Reverend Al Sharpton excoriated Kookish's "arrogant fantasy," calling it "blame the victim" rhetoric from the right and predicting that the incident would set race relations in the US back fifty years, even though Kookish is white. "It don't matter who the victim is, it's who's doing the blaming that makes it wrong," Sharpton said.

Regardless of the troubling short-term fallout from the incident, the long term trends are clear. "We need to make people understand they don't matter," stated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "Having become cogs in the huge state machine, they can't be allowed to think independently and control their lives; that's what we're here for." Pelosi stressed the inevitability of new taxes and government programs in order to liberate people from such delusions. "People like Willard Kookish better get this through their thick skulls: it's not their fault, it's society's. And that's why they need President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress to subdue this country in order to fix it."