And the deal falls apart

Dump the lot of them. Dump the Republicans who voted against it and called their cowardice “conservative”—what, do they think there’s going to be a better option to come along?—dump the 95 Democrats in the House who followed them down the rat hole, and dump the House “leadership” of both parties who couldn’t get the job done. Along with them, kick the Senate “leadership” to the curb who couldn’t even get a vote off. These are the guys who created the problem, and they’re the ones who refused to fix it until it came to a crisis, and now they won’t put their careers on the line to fix it when it is a crisis? What do we need them for? What good are they?Update: OK, it appears I was too hard on the House GOP, though I still think they did wrong: it appears Nancy Pelosi was trying to set them up. For all her productive efforts to pull the deal together, she never lifted a finger to get her own party to vote for it. In fact, she did everything possible to make it painless for House Democrats to vote against it. Then, just before the vote, she gave a speech tearing into the GOP, angering and alienating all those Republican Representatives whose votes she’d been soliciting. Clearly, she wanted the bill either to fail—and to be branded a Republican failure—or to pass in such a way that it could be blamed on the GOP as a Republican bill. I’m still very unhappy with the House GOP—again, do they think this failure is likely to lead to a better outcome?—but given that a lot of them really didn’t believe in the bill, I can understand why so many voted against it, given the stunts Speaker Pelosi was pulling; and given her behavior, there’s no question in my mind that the blame for this one belongs squarely on her shoulders.At this point, I’m hoping that my pessimism is wrong and that Joseph Calhoun is right:

We are not on the verge of a new depression. The housing bubble collapse in California, Florida and a few other states is not enough to bring down the entire banking system. Investors who made mistakes in these markets should be held responsible and those who navigated the Fed-distorted market should be rewarded for their wisdom and prudence. Enacting the Paulson plan will not allow that to happen and our economy will suffer for it in the long run. The Japanese tried to prop up failed banks in the aftermath of the bursting of their twin bubbles and the result was 15 years of stagnation. Why are we emulating a strategy that is a demonstrable failure? A better alternative would be to allow capitalism to work as it should and stop the interventions of the Fed in the money market. Trust capitalism. It works.

He’s a minority voice in his opinion that the economy can get through this without a major infusion of capital; but he could still be right. Here’s hoping.