Republican Socialism

Didn't know that Republicans were socialists, did you?

Well, life throws you a few curves every now and again.

It turns out that the party dedicated to laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog capitalism is now begging en masse to be allowed to suckle on the government tit! Who knew?

It seems that if an ordinary citizen gets overextended on his house payments it's "Fuck you, buddy -- you're foreclosed!" But if it's a company like Bear Stearns or AIG and they screw up, well, they're just "too big to fail."

Sense a bit of a double standard here?

Consider the ramifications of the lead paragraph from Mike Allen's piece on Politico.com:

Congressional leaders said after meeting Thursday evening with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that as much as $1 trillion could be needed to avoid an imminent meltdown of the U.S. financial system.

That's one trillion dollars. With a "t."

And yes, he did use the word "imminent meltdown."

Still want to vote for the Republicans because you think Sarah Palin's hot?

To continue with the Politico.com piece:

Paulson announced plans Friday morning for a "bold approach" that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. At a news conference at Treasury headquarters, he called for a "temporary asset relief program" to take bad mortgages off the books of the nation's financial institutions. Congressional leaders had left Washington on Friday, but Paulson planned to confer with them over the weekend.

"We're talking hundreds of billions," Paulson told reporters. "This needs to be big enough to make a real difference and get to the heart of the problem." [...]

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” said lawmakers were told last night “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications, here at home and globally.”

“What you heard last evening is one of those rare moments — certainly rare in my experience here — was that Democrats and Republicans decided we needed to work together, quickly,” Dodd said.

Are you scared yet?

It seems that the G.O.P.'s fiscal chickens are coming home to roost -- just in time for the election.

And it's time to ask some rhetorical (but important) questions:

Which party is better equipped to deal with this imminent financial meltdown? The party that got us out of the Great Depression? Or the party that got us into it? The party that ran up huge deficits, not once, but twice in the past 30 years? Or the party that turned one of those deficits into a surplus?

The answer's pretty clear. At least to me. Because voting Republican at this point in time is like hiring an arsonist to put out the fire he set.

Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.