The New York Post last week graced its smackdown of Detroit's automakers with a picture of the Three Stooges standing around a collapsed jalopy. It didn't bother to say which stooge represented which company, but I will -- Ford Motor Co. is Moe, arguably the sharpest of the bunch.

Or so the Dearborn automaker is trying to appear. Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr. and his CEO, Alan Mulally, are balancing fine distinctions in their public statements with calculated efforts to distance Ford from the imminent-collapse scenario weighing on the competition.

That is, Ford doesn't need federal cash now, but its leaders would like a $9 billion credit line just in case. They know Detroit's auto giants are taking massive hits to their reputations in these go-to-Washington charades with all their media coverage, but they know there's potential opportunity in being the one that emerges the least damaged.

They don't want General Motors and Chrysler to fail because it could take them and a lot of suppliers down, too, in the mother of all bankruptcies. But they wouldn't necessarily complain if the quasi-nationalization of their two Detroit rivals indirectly burnishes the Blue Oval and burdens the others with more bureaucracy.

"I think if they see Ford as a company trying to pull itself up by its own bootstraps, and making it on its own and pulling the right levers," Bill Ford told the Associated Press, "I think that could be a positive for us."

It could be, even if it is a play fraught with external factors like politics, the economy, credit markets and consumer confidence that Ford cannot control. More problematic: Ford has demonstrated its own capacity to burn cash ($7.7 billion last quarter), its U.S. assets are pledged fully to its lenders and it's not getting any more traction selling cars than anyone else.

But Ford's "we're different" gambit is a risk worth taking considering the alternative -- surrendering independence and product decisions to one or more federal "car czars" who are as likely to be driven by the political considerations of their Washington patrons as the shifting demands of the U.S. car and truck market.

Disaster-in-the-making doesn't begin to describe the automotive Frankenstein that could be created should GM and Chrysler draw the proffered $14 billion, as they must to make it to March, execute draconian cutbacks under federal oversight and then ask for more.

That, of course, assumes the Senate follows the House and passes the torturous bailout bill that the Bush White House doesn't much like, Senate Republicans like even less and a majority of Americans, to the extent they understand the ramifications, say they don't, either.

As the bailout -- sorry, "bridge loan" -- talks in Washington unspool, it's clear the desperation of GM and Chrysler has reduced two of Detroit's three automotive pillars to malleable hulks willing to accept just about anything to stay afloat and outside the purported death sentence of bankruptcy. Whatever Congress wants, GM and Chrysler will find a way to accept it.

Which is why any self-respecting, business-minded person, anyone who shudders at the prospect of a France-i-fied auto industry controlled from the nation's capital by a coalition of politicians and special interest groups, should be pulling for the Blue Oval boys to actually get through this bleak time without taking public money.

Relatively speaking -- and that's an important qualifier -- they played their cards quicker and more cannily than the competition. Former CFO Don Leclair wrested $23 billion from the credit markets before they froze up, and now GM couldn't emulate Ford's play even if it wanted to. With some $20 billion in unencumbered GM assets around the world, by the company's reckoning, you can bet that rankles atop the RenCen.

Mulally dumped Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover while he could, all the easier because his predecessors mostly failed to integrate the luxury brands into Ford's global product development machine. Same we-can-cut-'em-loose rationale holds for Volvo, if Ford can find a buyer.

Only Mazda, the second-tier but capable Japanese player, is crucial to Ford's global product strategy going forward. That's the only reason a wind-down of Ford's one-third stake (for a comparative pittance, considering its value to Ford) didn't become a full-blown divestiture.

Does that mean Ford is guaranteed to emerge from this nightmare unscathed, independent, controlled by its founding family and not a car czar, a foreign automaker or a bankruptcy judge?

No, it isn't. Not in these times. For so much of Ford's future assumes the economy won't get worse, that it will successfully rejuvenate its American lineup with European models, that gas prices will creep closer to $3-a-gallon than wallow at half that, giving would-be buyers little incentive to pay a premium for hybrid Fords and Lincolns.

They're all moving targets. The brutal reality of trying to do business -- almost any business -- today is that things change with lightning speed and good stories can turn very bad.