The power of the human mind, when faced with facts or realities at odds with long-held beliefs, to find ways to deny said facts or realities, is a wonder to behold.

Case in point: Bruce Lisman.

Lisman is the native Vermonter who spent decades in the executive suites of Wall Street before retiring to his home state in 2009. Last fall, he created Campaign for Vermont, the self-described nonpartisan, common-sense organization that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on clearly conservative issue-advocacy ads.  

In May of 2010 Lisman gave a talk in Burlington, which bore the verbose and mildly creepy title “Finding Skin: How Vermont Can Become Its Own Version of an Economic Powerhouse Without Abandoning Its Values.”

This talk can be seen online thanks to the good folks at Burlington’s Channel 17/Town Meeting Television. I’ve watched the whole thing, and I’ll have a full report in the near future. (Suffice it to say, Lisman reveals himself as (1) a lousy public speaker and (2) a hard-core free-marketeer whose policy prescriptions wouldn’t be out of line in a speech by Paul Ryan.)

For now, I wanted to pass along one little nugget from the talk. Remember that Lisman spent almost his entire career at Bear Stearns, the financial firm responsible for many of the iffy investment vehicles that almost brought down the global economy in 2008.

In his talk, Lisman gave the following description of the 2008 calamity:

“This thing that happened to us in ’08 and ’09 was not the ordinary garden-variety recession. It was a Darwinian asteroid that hit us. It was big enough to topple countries.”

Oh. My. God. Where do I begin? “This thing that happened,” this “Darwinian asteroid” (whatever the f*ck that’s supposed to mean). This Act of God. It wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was an unforeseeable catastrophe that suddenly manifested out of nowhere. “Sure, we ran the Titanic through iceberg-infested waters and ignored 21 separate warnings of hazardous ice in its path — but who could have possibly foreseen its collision with an iceberg? Yeah, the sinking of the ship, the loss of 1500 people, it was this thing that happened.”

There are only two explanations for this piece of utter claptrap:

1. Bruce Lisman is in the grip of a magnificent delusion triggered by the collision of (a) his devout belief in the unsinkability of the free market and (b) the fact that Wall Street ran into an iceberg of its own making and had to be rescued by the government.

2. Bruce Lisman is a goddamn self-serving liar.

You make the call.

More on “Finding Skin” coming soon in this space.