Bloodthirsty Liberal

Maybe this is what happens when you pick someone from Goldman Sachs to run your economy. Comity and humility aren’t exactly embossed on the letterhead there.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson finally confirmed what lonely bailout opponents tried to tell the American public all along: The man doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.

Paulson held a bazooka to taxpayers’ heads. He groveled on his knees in front of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He lured leaders from both political parties into linking arms in a panicked Chicken Little line dance for the beleaguered mortgage industry. Paulson demanded an unprecedented $700 billion troubled assets relief program for the good of the country. For the health of the housing market. For the survival of the economy. No time for deliberation. No time to review the failures of such interventionist approaches around the world. Now, now, now!

…

This is the man who proclaimed the subprime crisis “largely contained” in April 2007; “near the bottom” in May 2007; and “largely contained” again in August 2007. This is the man who pledged that he had “no interest in bailing out lenders or property speculators” in October 2007 and couldn’t “think of any situation where the backdrop of the global economy was as healthy as it is today.” This is the man who patted himself on the back for refusing to “put taxpayer money on the line” to rescue Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15 – and then turned around the next day and engineered the $85 billion taxpayer-funded bailout of AIG. This is the man who vowed he had “no plans to insert money” into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac –and then turned around and committed $200 billion in capital and credit lines to those corrupt, bloated, crumbling institutions. This is the man who declared “the worst is likely to be behind us” in May 2008.

We’ve already plowed untold billions (trillions?) into the financial markets; Big Auto is next in line, tin cup extended; I heard that the International House of Pancakes is seeking to reclassify itself as a bank holding company to qualify for its share of goodies.

I honestly can’t tell you I know what I’d do, but I thought capitalism allowed for the possibility of failure. It seems that all we are doing is perpetuating and reinforcing failed businesses, and that the solutions are being crafted and implemented by the very same gonnifs who got us into this mess in the first place. It is they who should be paying bail, not we who are paying bailouts.

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but is this the end of the United States of America as we know it?