Wow. Ken Lewis can sleep secure in the knowledge that he has Mary Newsom, Taylor Batten and crew in his corner. This quaint, little editorial bashing the very bashable John Thain misses the skyscrapers and hones in on the trashcans.

Yes, Thain has the PR sense of, well, a Manhattan Master of the Universe who can buy and sell entire ad agencies with a flick of a Blackberry. The chump change, in CEO terms, he dumped on new office digs — bad idea. Guilty as charged.

Lewis, meanwhile, has only been A) Snookered into losing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and shareholder value or B) Complicit in losing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and shareholder value. Certainly starting with the deal for Countrywide, Lewis has led Bank of America on a path he did not fully comprehend. Countrywide looked like a continuation of BofA’s long-standing tradition — dating back to the early 90s — of doing exactly what federal regulators wanted done, and doing it with a smile. The feds wanted a white knight to pull back Countrywide’s mortgage-writing excesses, in rode Lewis.

But Lewis either didn’t know or didn’t care that Countrywide, like Golden West, was essentially a Ponzi scheme waiting to collapse. Fast-forward a few months, and the collapse of Lehman Bros. throws the entire investment sector into disarray, in rides Lewis to “save” Merrill Lynch and Thain in a deal essentially brokered by the feds. Lewis tied himself in knots trying to justify the deal, which contravened his previous statements about getting entangled in the hardcore investment banking scene. Almost immediately BofA set about trying to digest ML having never fully put Countrywide to sleep.

Then and only then did Lewis and crew begin to understand what they had done. They had taken on certainly tens and possibly hundreds of billions in toxic assets held by their hasty corporate meals. Unlike the quick and dirty mergers of previous decades, there was no way for BofA to quickly shed branches and staff and sell it all to Wall Street with a bow on top, and then hop on to the next deal.

On the plus side, Lewis was able to use Thain’s Goldman Sachs connections to win BofA billions more in federal bailout money, which was smart, but this shocked his clueless shareholders who had actually bought into the Lewis white knight mythos. As a result, BofA stock tanks and analysts the world over realize that US money center banks are still in a mortally dangerous capital situation.

Meanwhile, the acquired ML is hemorrhaging talent that has no interest in being BofAed now or later and which sees little pleasure in working for Thain now that the company has been sold off. The result is the value of what Lewis paid for is cut down yet further, yet Lewis sticks with Thain rather than reach out to long-time MLers. Then, only when the matter of ML bonuses and losses gains traction, Lewis reverses course and dumps Thain, expecting a PR coup. He gets one — for about 24 hours.

Thain lets rip with the counter-claim that Lewis and BofA knew everything he knew about ML’s assets — or lack thereof. This quickly gets into the area of disclosure, which gets the attention of the SEC, which is where we stand today. Pay no attention to the notion that BofA’s board could fire Lewis. That will not happen now, not with the SEC sniffing around, which essentially freezes decision making, especially for a board packed with Hugh McColl’s cronies.

In sum, a very complicated financial story can be boiled down in simple terms. Lewis let his own merger-fueled hubris and misplaced belief the in power of pleasing federal regulators overwhelm his lack of knowledge about the fundamental soundness of both Countrywide and Merrill. And provincial, insular, and essentially uninformed commentators will always defend their local patron and benefactor facts be damned.