Relief is just a swallow away

Well, what a relief - the Dow is on its way back up and that means things are getting better, right?

I'm not swallowing the Kool-Aid medicine, but I am chuckling to think that the party whose backbone for so many years has been that government intervention is bad; a party who has been screaming that government is part of the problem, not part of the solution and that an offer of government help is the scariest thing in the world, is now proposing that we get out of our troubles by starting another huge agency for the bailing out of institutions that got into trouble because of deregulation. We are to escape from a world of debt, by handing the taxpayers another mountain of bad debt and yet another level of hack-packed bureaucracy.

Is this any different than getting a new credit card to charge the payments we can't afford to make on the old credit cards? A financial apocalypse won't arrive on horseback, it may well arrive by not arriving. When foreign buyers spurn our debt instruments we're in the deep stuff and repackaging bad debt isn't, in my opinion, going to make an attractive product.

If I were ever to feel even a grudging respect for the Republican geniuses who have been selling us war and indebtedness, it would come only if that party acknowledged that their foreign and economic policies have been wrong from the beginning, and not just in their implementation but in principle. Yes, I know.

A majority of Americans may believe in the reality of Guardian Angels, but I don't. I believe in getting out while the getting is good.