Bailout Bill Failure

Once again, I'm pressed for time, so I can't go into too much detail regarding the House of Representatives failure today to pass the bailout bill. I can tell you that both Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Republican Minority Leader John Boehner are both morons.

On the topic of the presidential candidates and this issue, this was an interesting start to the day. From Politico:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his top aides took credit for building a winning bailout coalition - hours before the vote failed and stocks tanked.

The rush to claim he had engineered a victory now looks like a strategic blunder that will prolong the McCain's campaign's difficulty in finding a winning message on the economy.

Shortly before the vote, McCain had bragged about his involvement and mocked Sen. Barack Obama for staying on the sidelines.

"I've never been afraid of stepping in to solve problems for the American people, and I'm not going to stop now," McCain told a rally in Columbus, Ohio. "Senator Obama took a very different approach to the crisis our country faced. At first he didn't want to get involved. Then he was monitoring the situation."

McCain, grinning, flashed a sarcastic thumbs-up.

Mark Ambinder of The Atlantic makes it clear that if McCain wanted at least some of the credit for passage of a bailout with his "campaign suspension" stunt from last week, he deserves that share of the blame today since it failed to pass. On that front, McCain first blamed Obama after the bill failed to pass, then said that this was not a time for "finger pointing." Perhaps he switched gears because lots and lots of fingers started to point squarly at him? On that front, check out this from Greg Sargent at TPM and this from Joe Klein at Time Magazine. I'd run from that, too.

29 September 2008

Addition: McCain has zigged again and has joined some Republicans in blaming Pelosi's pre-vote speech for the failure of the bill. The speech was idiotic, to be sure, but just how many excuses can McCain make in a single day? The count continues.

1 October 2008 Addition: Here is a great recap of the misstatements and lies told by McCain in the aftermath of the bailout failure.