Posted by Niall O'Dowd at 4/14/2009 10:06 AM EDT

“Ireland’s economy in free fall collapse” blared The Huffington Post on Monday. Coming from a columnist on perhaps the most influential political site on the web, it set off alarm bells.

According to columnist Sheldon Filger, who is described as founder of GlobalEconomicCrisis.com, "The economic catastrophe facing Ireland will cause sorrows that cannot be suppressed by a pint of Guinness. Nothing less than national insolvency threatens this once robust economy.

“And lest the United States pretend that the economic collapse now underway in Ireland is irrelevant to its own situation, the elements that have brought down the "Celtic Tiger" are almost identical to those now eating away at the very foundation of the U.S. economy.

Whew! Sheldon -- whose name sounds like a character from a Harold Robbins novel -- certainly knows how to lay it on like a trowel.

There’s more:

“In many ways, Ireland seems to be a microcosm of the United States, only with a Gaelic accent. However, sheer size and the status of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency has delayed the full replication of what Ireland is currently experiencing. For that reason, what is occurring to the Irish economy in the present may be a window of what might soon lie ahead for the United States.

“It appears that the IMF may be the ultimate lender of last resort for Ireland, and that kind of assistance will impose costs of its own.”

Run for the exits everyone! Man the hatches! Country overboard!

But wait!

Who is Sheldon Filger, and why does he have such an exalted column at The Huffington Post?

Well, Sheldon isn’t exactly an economist, or someone highly trained in the black arts of financial insight. Instead, Sheldon is actually a student of another kind of figures – i.e., a writer of soft-core pornography.

Believe me, I hadn’t heard of Sheldon before today, but if I had, I’m sure it would have been for his “Erotic Book,” which is about the “sensuality of women and which describes wonderfully I'm sure, the “erotic physicality of girls.”

Well, well. And what has that got to do with the price of Guinness in Ireland you might ask? Precisely my question.

But there’s more from Sheldon: There’s his authoritative tome about Hillary Clinton. Alas, again I confess I have not read it. It's on sale somewhere, look it up: “Hillary Clinton, Nude”

The mind can only imagine what Sheldon got up to in that particular book.

So this is the man The Huffington Post is putting forward as an economic expert?

Dear readers, We knew perhaps that Ireland was in deep doo-doo, but having Sheldon the porn writer tell us so makes it even more absurd!