Dear Nancy Pelosi,
Is this bailout thing critical to our nation's financial security or not? If it were, then your only move would be to get it passed and stop trying to pad the vote with cross-party CYA. That you'd rather blow it up than pass it along party lines tells me one of two things: one is deeply unflattering to the bailout, the other is even more deeply unflattering to you.
Dear John Boehner (et al),
THANK YOU for standing up for fiscal sanity. The New York Times editorial board will of course judge you for "partisanship," even though the only two relevant questions are:
Does the country need a bank bailout?
Does the country need this bank bailout?
This is not McCain's finest hour, but if I had the time I'd barnstorm district by district to get more of you and less of Frank/Pelosi. (And yes, they showed me why my vote is best spent on McCain after all.)
Remainders:
A healthy bank's perspective on the rescue plan. (I wonder what this bank thinks.)
Only 48 hits, most of them from whacked-out message board threads. I wonder what the number will be in a week.
UPDATE: You'll no doubt read (here for example) about how Newt Gingrich did the same "at least 100 other-party votes" thing for NAFTA. But that was an unambiguously good thing (that was politically unpopular despite being unambiguously good), where we would either make the world a much better place soon or have to wait awhile for that to happen.
By contrast, I assume everyone agrees that this $700B bailout would be terrible, where the only question is (and only plausible reason for passing it) whether the entire system would collapse tomorrow without it. The only circumstances under which this bailout should come to pass are circumstances so dire that nobody should give a damn about party affiliation.
Posted by Matt Bruce at September 26, 2008 10:30 AM