Capitol Hill Sausage Makers

Watching Congress this week brings back childhood memories of living next to a frankfurter factory. From dawn until dark, trucks backed up to loading docks, where men in long aprons with red and brown smears hauled haunches and pushed bins inside. What went on inside was a mystery, but the stains and smells made it clear that flesh was being hacked and ground to bits around the clock. Spicy seasonings could never mask the reek from that building.

The $800 billion-plus sausage that may emerge from the House today has been stuffed with so much pork and other red meat for voters that it's hard to keep track of the scraps, including tax relief for motor racing tracks, extending restaurant improvement credits and exempting from excise tax wooden arrow shafts for use by children.

"I am hopeful that there will be bipartisan, majority support for this bill that is critical to stabilizing our nation's economy for all working Americans," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, said last night in anticipation of the debate that begins this morning.

The vote is expected to be close on what Paul Krugman calls "originally the Paulson plan, then the Paulson-Dodd-Frank plan, and now, I guess, the Paulson-Dodd-Frank-Pork plan (it’s been larded up since the House rejected it on Monday).

"I hope that it passes, simply because we’re in the middle of a financial panic, and another no vote would make the panic even worse. But that’s just another way of saying that the economy is now hostage to the Treasury Department’s blunders."

Pass the mustard.

Fear-Mongering to the Finish

George W. Bush's political epitaph will read: "From first to last, he scared the hell out of the American people."

Starting with fabricated forebodings about Saddam Hussein's imminent plans to nuke us into oblivion, his Administration played the fear card all the way to this week's deadpan televised alarm about financial panic. At the White House meeting the next day, he warned Congressional leaders and the presidential candidates in his usual elegant phrasing, “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.”

In 2002, we had a president who made us want hide under our beds and, six years later, he was inspiring us to hide our money under the mattress.

Franklin D. Roosevelt started his tenure by telling Americans, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In a new century, when the new president came to office, political prophets should have told us, "The only thing we have to fear is Bush himself."

Even the most diehard horror-movie lovers will find eight years of being terrified too much. For the next White House movie, they will be looking for a new theme. Hope, perhaps.