Fear and Loathing

I think this article pretty well captures the sentiment of people on the left and right about this bailout package. Some combination of fear and anger dominate the public mood at the moment, and rightly so. This crisis appears to the average person to have come from nowhere, and at the same time that people are realizing that their personal livelihoods have been made hostage to rampant profiteering on Wall Street, leaders in Congress and President Bush himself are haranguing us with threats about how dire this crisis is-a crisis they should have seen coming and should have done something about, or what the hell are we sending them up there for-at the same time that economists are telling us that the bailout is either immediately necessary or not really necessary at all. It really should come as no surprise that many people are simply saying to hell with it and are willing to let the whole mess collapse if it'll drag down the bastards that got us into this mess too. Can you blame them? Right now what this country needs is a big apology from Congress and the President, along the lines of "we know we fucked up and we're really sorry but please you've got to let us fix this and we promise to make sure it never happens again." I find that humility and shame goes a long way when you've fucked up, and that lesson applies just as well to people we elect to higher office.