Burn, Bankers, Burn!

Wall Street was awash with blood yesterday after Christian fundamentalists descended on New York's financial district, frenziedly attacking anyone who looked like a banker. The bizarre scenes followed Republican Vice Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin's claims that the failure of US financial institutions such as Lehmann Brothers was the result of their executives being in the service of Mammon. "Those bastards were sacrificing children to their heathen God in exchange for improved share dividends," declared one of the fundamentalists, as she bludgeoned a red braces wearing bank employee with a bible. "The liquidators found the blood-covered altar in the basement of Lehmann Brothers - there was a huge effigy of Mammon himself presiding over it, cast from solid gold!" The Palin camp moved quickly to try and disassociate their candidate from the carnage in the banking sector, claiming that she had merely been speaking figuratively, and hadn't meant to imply that bankers were literally devil-worshipping child murderers. "I simply meant to say that the unregulated pursuit of personal gain on the part of certain members of the financial sector was in danger of sucking the life blood from ordinary Americans," Palin explained in an official statement designed to clarify her position. However, within hours of this 'clarification', reports started flooding in from the mid-West that hundreds of small town banks had been besieged by angry mobs of citizens waving sharpened stakes and blazing torches, shouting "Kill the vampires!

Critics have claimed that Palin as a track record of, supposedly unwittingly, inspiring such atrocities, pointing to last year's Alaskan witch hunts which culminated in two sciene teachers being burned at the stake for teaching evolutionary theory. "Again, it was a case of people taking Governor Palin's words out of context," explained an exasperated aide. "Some misguided individuals confused her personal belief in creationism over evolution with her call for action to stop children's indoctrination with unChristian ideas and values through the media." Campaign organisers have argued that these continued faux pas aren't her fault. "Look, it hasn't nothing to do with the fact that she is incapable of expressing herself in unambiguous, straightforward terms, without reference to religious imagery," said spokesperson Zeke Dungee. "But this sort of thing is bound to happen when you are trying to appeal to a bunch of idiotic rednecks incapable of understanding anything in other than in literal terms. It isn't Sarah Palin's fault that eight years of George W Bush has so alienated educated voters that we're being forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel and court a lower class of supporter." Palin's running mate, Senator John McCain, has so far been unavailable for comment on these developments, but was seen sitting in his campaign bus, head in his hands mumbling, "Oh Jesus Christ, why did I pick her? What have I done?"