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Was This A Blank Check Too Far?

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By Daniel Ruth

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 30, 2008

One could be forgiven for crawling into a fetal position to begin sobbing like a Bronte sister while sucking a bottle of Boodles gin dry after hearing the leader of the free world confidently predict the $700 federal bailout of the nation's financial system will work like a fine Swiss watch.

After all, it was the Bush administration that crowed we would be treated like liberators rather than occupiers in Iraq; the same folks who oversaw the highest gas prices in the nation's history, as well as the introduction of torture for terrorism suspects and, of course, will we ever forget those immortal words - "Heckuva job, Brownie."

So an endorsement of the nearly trillion dollar rescue plan by this crowd would be a bit like O.J. Simpson offering to testify as a character witness for Timothy McVeigh. Reassurance hardly abounds.

There's been an awful lot of understandable anger on the part of the peasants with pitchforks, who feel they are being asked to pick up the bar tab for a bunch of silk-stocking, greedy idiots on Wall Street who managed to financially plunge the most powerful nation on the face of the planet into Haiti, only with more cable television channels.
Air Kiss
So it's understandable why it was a bit difficult to find out how our own member of Congress, Rep. Kathy Castor, D-She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not, was planning to vote on the $700 billion air kiss to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Let's face it, if you are a House member up for re-election, trying to justify to constituents why you just voted in favor of a $700 billion plate of cold lima beans is not exactly a glowing resume builder.

Throughout the day, Castor kept her own counsel on her voting intentions, which led her new flack and my former colleague Ellen Gedalius to send out a pouty letter the congresswoman sent to President Bush last week on another matter when she was asked what her boss was going to do.

Eventually Castor voted nay, although who knows if the bailout effort will return in some fashion for another life, another vote.

21st Century Depression

To be sure, a clinically dispassionate case can be made about why the bailout package ought to have passed in the House - the need to regenerate the credit markets, the potential for disaster in the bank and real estate sectors, averting the impending threat of a 21st Century Depression if nothing happened. All very fair.

It's merely a guess, but ultimately the public revulsion to the $700 billion stocking stuffer might have stemmed from a sense that this really wasn't a "bailout" of the swells who got us into this mess, but rather it represented the payment of a ransom, of sorts, to free an economy held hostage by avarice, self-interest and stupidity.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson may be a brilliant guy, but after eight years of incompetence in the prosecution of the Iraq War, the politicization of the judicial system, the failures in dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the idea of saddling the taxpayers with $700 billion in unaccountable debt finally represented a blank check too far.

And so Kathy Castor voted no, realizing perhaps that you can put all the lipstick you want on a plate of cold lima beans ... well, you get the idea.

Keyword: Book of Ruth, to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.

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