When the Washington Times isn't busy denouncing Barack Obama as Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, or a cunning Muslim propagandist, it's supplying heart-rending accounts of the small-investor's plight. The Unification Church-financed organ of Right-thinking opinion-affectionately known as "The Afternoon Moon" when it first began thumping its way onto Beltway doorsteps in the 1980s-this week debuts an ambitious multipart package: "The Bondholders," a pioneering effort to depict the true victims of GM's government-managed bankruptcy as the holders of the automaker's corporate debt, muscled rudely aside by claims of the United Auto Workers in the company's sweeping reorganization.

Now, it's true that there's nothing pretty about GM's restructuring-and that individual bondholders are further out on a limb than the financial concerns holding 80% of the company's debt if the plan fails and the new carmaker doesn't turn around soon. Even so, it's a considerable reach to paint the chief casualties of the deal as "paralegals, pilots, small-business owners and lots and lots of retirees," in the Odets-like reverie of writer William Ehart-forgotten men and women who "feel they are hostage not just to bankruptcy court but also to politics."

Without diminishing the genuine losses and anxieties that pensioners may feel over the GM deal, it does bear noting that, unlike AIG, Citbank and other bloated recipients of TARP largess, GM and Chrysler submitted detailed proposals to curb costs and achieve profitability. In GM's case, that meant cutting 47,000 jobs across the globe and closing 14 North American plants by 2012.

So the hectic assertion that Obama and friends steamrolled established bankruptcy law in order to deliver an outsized share of the company's equity into the scheming union's hands-even though, as Ehart ruefully notes, "bondholders.. loaned the company more than the Treasury and the UAW did"–leaves out a rather sizable part of the overall picture. It's not as though UAW members are ordering $87,000 rugs and $35,000 "commodes on legs" in the manner of other notorious TARP beneficiaries.

Also worth bearing in mind is what a bankruptcy performed without union-and- government support would look like-the kind of plan that outlets like the Washington Times seem, by default at least, to support. One doesn't have to look far back in the annals of mega-bankruptcies to get an idea of how bondholders would make out in that scenario. Lehman Brothers, anyone? The Enron model-which held employee pensions hostage to the company's worthless stock , which they were not permitted to unload in the manner of Messrs. Skilling and Lay-is no longer legal, but even that soak-the-workers approach was precious little comfort to bondholders.

Indeed, in agreeing to the bankruptcy, GM bondholders acquired warrants to purchase an additional 15% stake in the company, putting their equity well above the 17.5% granted to the UAW. (As is the standard coy fashion in tea-bag happy media outlets, Ehart churlishly notes that the bondholders "were first offered just a 10 percent stake" in the company, without supplying any of the follow-up details that mean they could raise their holdings up to 25 percent of the firm's equity.)

As for the sample of nine out-of-luck bondholders profiled in the series' maiden entry, they are indeed victims-mainly of bad or incomplete investment counseling. GM bonds were downgraded to junk status back in 2005-and as no end of eTrade and Charles Schwab ads remind us, individual investors have more complete oversight of their portfolios than ever before, in our brave new information millennium.

One of them, Jim Modica, a retired supervisor of (yes) auto company employee contributions, candidly says as much, as he surveys the grim fallout from plunging some $700,000 into GM bonds: "It all comes back on me.... I said they'd be safe." The general run of sentiment, though, is in line with the restrained wisdom of the Washington Times editorial page. "When you have an American free-market company like GM being taken over by the government," says William Nast, who unlike Modica only had 10% of his portfolio in GM bonds, "it reminds me of a dictatorship."

Twenty-four-year old college student David Talbot, who's out just a $5,000 GM bond his grandfather gave him when he was a kid, nonetheless recites his own passage from the free-marketeer book of shibboleths: "I like the idea of GM sorting its own stuff out. The more [the government] gets its hand mixed up in the pot, the more I expect to lose that investment."

Of course, the auto industry in the United States has not been "sorting its own stuff out" for quite some time-particularly when foreign car concerns have pushed to win tax breaks to expand production facilities in low-wage Southern states. And it turns out, on closer inspection, that holders of the new GM's stock also stand to realize about $12 billion in tax breaks down the road. But those are evidently small matters, weighed against the rallying cry of dictatorship-however temporary and statistically insignificant that alleged tyrannical government seizure of private property proves to be.

This is the same economic fairyland, after all, where a successful conservative boycott of GM over its hateful new status as "Government Motors" would set the economic order magically aright by, um, the auto behemoth's failure in the marketplace-and wouldn't produce in the process any new stampede for government benefits, pension support, and other such interventions.

All in all, it's entirely fitting that the Washington Times secures its own debts courtesy of an authoritarian preacher declaring himself "God's ambassador." No earthly power, after all, is going to honor this kind of intellectual scrip.

Previously: Our General Motors