Bailout Blues

It's not every day highwayscribery finds itself cheering Rep. Darrell Issa (D-Calif) on some cable news program.

Issa was telling someone from MSNBC why he didn't vote for yesterday's $700 billion sop to Wall Street.

He was responding to a claim, generally disseminated in the wake of the House of Representatives' stunning vote, that "the government is broken," "the people have given up on their political leadership," and similar dross.

Issa, a fairly right-wing conservative from San Diego, was occupying the same page the highway scribe was with his insistence the public had lost faith in Wall Street, not the government.

The government, by contrast, actually worked - barely - and thanks to the design of our miraculous Founding Fathers.

For the 10 days we watched Democrats, who've spent the past eight years rolling over for the Bush Administration do everything they could to deliver it, and the lamentable Sen. John McCain (D-Ariz), another legislative victory.

The way Democrats will join the administration when its own party has gone AWOL is incomprehensible. And there they were, yet again, sweating pills in an effort at rounding up votes to buttress Bush's plan and buck-up a financial sector that treats them as some Trotskyite legacy.

Folks, it's not socialism when the money goes to the wealthy. It's fascism.

Again, the familiar bipartisan "consensus" seemed to be forming in the usual inexorable way those of us on the outside find inscrutable.

Calls to Congressional offices were running 10-1 against the bailout, but our noble legislators were ready to save the likes of Lehman Bros., while further empowering Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a gentleman who helped concoct this noxious dish.

The markets melted. Credit is going to be hard to get. A lot of guys in wing-tipped shoes will be out of work.

Good.

That's how grown-ups deal with things; excepting the consequences of their actions. And while highwayscribery is no fan of unfettered markets, it certainly favors a correction that is richly deserved by a people that wants cake and to eat it too, a people that approves wars while passing the associated expense onto the young and unborn.

For reasons that aren't worth going into, some Democrats and some Republicans on the fringe of things listened to their constituents and opted to can this thing, or "Punish the country," as Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass).

Indeed many Americans, including the goofs who accepted wacky loans on houses they couldn't afford, the lowly agents who duped them for commissions they knew were not commensurate with the service rendered, and the Wall Strett fancy pants who concocted financial instruments for generating nonexistent wealth...are getting their deserts.

Screw Wall Street. The companies that sink will be replaced by those with a more sober and responsible approach to finance. Let them fail the way the highway scribe would have to fail for mismanaging his finances and his business.

If the country has to suffer short-term, that's better than suffering long-term.

People didn't like this bill because they see the healthy and wealth getting a break their government has been philosophically against giving to them for 28 years now.

Hats off to those representatives who had the courage to see this thing for what it was and may they hold firm as the economic news gets worse.