Except he never told us he was going to drown it in debt.
I don’t have much to say about the royal hosing we are about to receive courtesy of this bailout, except to quote my friend Mat, who said that this feels an awful lot like some third-world dictator looting the treasury before he seeks asylum in a non-extradition country.
To my mind, this bailout represents the final confirmation (as if any were needed) that everything, and I mean every single thing, that Republicans have been nattering on about incessantly for the 30 years has been a load of utter bullshit. All of it: traditional values, deregulation, government is the problem, bootstrapping, entitlements, small government, personal responsibility, handouts, dependency. And it demolishes in an instant the ultimate conservative shibboleth, the one fetishized by Republicans as though they were Gollum with his ring: that the unfettered Market will resolve all problems.
The idealogical underpinnings of the Republican party now lie in tatters. Good riddance. And given that, maybe $700 billion doesn’t seem so expensive after all.
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Here is Glenn Greenwald, saying it better than I ever could.
Again, regardless of whether this nationalization/bailout scheme is “necessary” or makes utilitarian sense, it is a crime of the highest order — not a “crime” in the legal sense but in a more meaningful sense.
What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism — where they reap tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles are paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes collapse? We’ve retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded.
Happy Valley News Hour 
The bigger government gets, the more opportunities there are for powerful men to loot the little guy. “For our own good,” of course (heck, they might even believe that).
Don’t kid yourself that we just have to find kind, virtuous, wise men to be in charge and everything will be peachy. Power corrupts…
If we really did have an unfettered Market, then we wouldn’t have Fannie and Freddie or the mortgage crisis in the first place, and we certainly wouldn’t have the former chairman of Goldman-Sachs spending our money to bail out the idiots on Wall Street.