If the federal government can bail out the banking and auto industries, why can’t it do the same for Twinkies, the beloved, spongy, cream-centered treats that are vanishing off store shelves — possibly forever — with the news that Hostess Brands is going the way of the Dodo, which is surprisingly not the name of one of its many products.

Over at WhiteHouse.gov, more than 350 hardworking Americans have already taken time out of all that working hard to put their name to a petition asking President Obama to nationalize the Twinkie industry and “prevent our nation from losing her sweet creamy center.”

(Side Note: We hope some web-metrics person out there is putting together a measurement of the number of times “sweet creamy center” has been posted online today.)

So if you believe that Twinkies are too sweet to fail, feel free to put your name on the petition.

We’re holding out hope that some other company sees the value in Twinkies (and Ho Ho’s, and maybe even Drake’s Cakes) and saves the government from having to answer years of questions about how it let the U.S. slip farther back in the international snack cake race.

In the meantime, sites like HoardTheHostess are already documenting today’s disastrous news.

We’d be remiss in today’s coverage of TwinkieGate 2012 if we didn’t run the following clip from Ghostbusters, because in the words of the great Winston Zeddemore, “That’s one big Twinkie.”

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