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Back in April, I wrote a column entitled "What Bernanke should've said." It was an effort to imagine the Chairman of Federal Reserve's first news conference, if that news conference happened after a couple glasses of scotch and in a moment of unusual personal empowerment. The difference between then and now is that unemployment has risen from 8.8 percent to 9.1 percent, Rick Perry has threatened mob violence and we've moved more firmly towards austerity. That is to say, this is what Bernanke should say, now more than ever, and what he's unlikely to say, now more than ever. So in anticipation of the central banker's big speech today -- and scroll down in Wonkbook for more on that -- here are excerpts from that column:

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"I have a lot of power. But I’m not a dictator. The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee has 12 members. If I’m being generous, five or six of them seriously understand how bad things are right now. And outside these walls, a guy who wrote a book called 'End the Fed' now chairs the House committee that oversees us. Sarah Palin appears to be developing strong and incoherent views on monetary policy. Paul Ryan dabbles in this stuff. If I went public with what really needs to be done — buying bonds related to the real economy rather than Treasury bonds, paying a negative rate on bank reserves so they move the money we’ve given them out of our coffers and into the labor market, doing price-level targeting so we make up for the years of sub-2 percent inflation with a few years where inflation is above 2 percent — I’d be strung up tomorrow. I’d go from having the freedom to talk half-measures to maybe — maybe! — having the freedom to take quarter-measures."

"And that’s fine. I understand why people are freaked out by the idea of some group of bearded economists getting together to decide what’s going to happen in the economy next year. But you know when exactly you get bearded economists making the big decisions? When Congress becomes too paralyzed and polarized to make them itself. I mean, good Lord. The division of labor here is — or at least is supposed to be — that the Federal Reserve holds interest rates down while Congress spends money to stimulate the economy. Then, in a few years, when the economy is working again, we begin tightening and they begin reducing the deficit. That’s what Japan should’ve done. In fact, I got hired for this job because I was one of the people telling Japan to do it. And now we should be doing it. But we’re not. Or, more precisely, Congress is not."

"Somehow, it’s even worse than that. Instead of doing something sensible, or even doing something nonsensical but internally consistent, Congress pretended to turn against the idea of stimulus and against the idea of deficits and then — and this is the part that really pisses me off — passed $850 billion of ineffective stimulus in the form of deficit-financed tax cuts. And it was only $850 billion because the two parties couldn’t decide between the president’s $3.2 trillion in deficit-financed cuts and the GOP’s $4 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts. So they passed two years of the Bush tax cuts and then some, and we all know that they’re going to pass trillions more in 2012. The total price tag of this will be incredible, none of it will be paid for, and it’s money we could’ve used to stimulate the economy when that stimulus was needed. And then you all have the audacity to whine about the deficit. It’s sickening."

"So, in conclusion, the economy is terrible, we should be doing more, and Congress should be doing much more, but instead we’re going to pretend the economy isn’t that bad, I’m going to pull back so you guys don’t jail me and everyone who works for me, and Congress is going to do the exact opposite of what economic theory and evidence would suggest and cut spending immediately while passing deficit-financed tax cuts for later. Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the debt ceiling, because if I start cursing and crying, the markets will really freak out."

"With that, I’ll be glad to take your questions."

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