It is hard to keep track of the extent of the carnage in our financial system right now. But for those of us who aren't really in the mood to contemplate what's happening to our life savings right now, there is some other carnage you might find more pleasant to consider: the complete hash this is making of conservatives' understanding of their world.
Yes, many prominent conservative pundits babble all kinds of contradictory poppycock all the time, trying to square patriotism with letting Bin Laden go free, or pious Christianity with screwing the less fortunate, or opposition to sex ed with opposition to abortion. But watching conservatives try to explain this market collapse is dizzying. Just to review, this crisis eating all our savings was caused when this administration trusted the market to ensure that reckless lenders like Countrywide financial would only issue mortgages to people who could pay them... and trusted the market to ensure that bankers wouldn't use too much borrowed money to bet on those mortgages... and generally trusted the market to ensure that the market wouldn't do what markets have always done left to their own devices: boom and bust, get caught up in their own hype and suffer a collapse of confidence.
He concedes we need a bailout. But not this bailout. Because this bailout is an insult to capitalism. Capitalism is not the problem. Greed is the problem. Government can't solve this problem. Government and greed created the problem.
4:21 PM
Poor Wolf Blitzer is trying to change the subject because there is nothing civil to say in response to that.
4:22 PM
Why is this fellow still on air?
4:23 PM
Rachel: blog it!
or twitter it. i think you need twtitter.
me: He's babbling about how this bill fundamentally changes who we are as a people. He's referencing the Great Depression for rhetorical oomph, seemingly not realizing that government was what got us out of that
