McCain comes riding and farting into Washington on his blind donkey, pressuring congress to rush things that are already being rushed too much so the debate will proceed. He politicizes negotiations, because if the house doesn't show that things were NOT settled, then McCain looks even more like an impulsive fool who wasted a lot of time and bluster rushing to DC. So his house Republican enablers rescue him by killing whatever progress was made on coming up with a solution.

The thing is, the Democrats are in a bind. If THEY hold things up, then Bush and the Republicans will accuse them of doing what they are always accused of-- preventing things from getting done. If they push a bill through, then the Republicans can play the Populist heroes, blocking passage of a bill that most voters don't like. The Dems are screwed either way.

Frankly, Bush-Cheney thrive best in situations like this, where they can engage in their secret machinations with the heat of media coverage focused elsewhere. But this time, they're doing their work-- work for the biggest corporations in the light of day and the member of congress are letting them get away with it.

What's that? Today, the biggest bank failure in US history occurred. How was it handled? The spoils, the remaining assets were given as a gift to Morgan Stanley. Wait a minute. Didn't they just last week convert to a commercial bank? And just days later, they are in place to take over the largest failed bank in history. What about those dusty old anti-trust laws? We're seeing more emergency mergers, coming harder and faster than any time in modern economic history.

It brings to mind Rachel Carson's historic book, Silent Spring. She described how the use of toxic pesticides was ascending the food chain, killing the carnivores at the top, where the most pesticide was accumulating. Today, we have huge companies. Vermont independent senator Bernie Sanders says "if a business is too big to fail it is too big to exist." Yet we're seeing these huge dying dinosauric examples of decrepitude being coprophagically eaten up by fellow dinosaurs. They all deserve to die. They are parts of a financial system built upon bad theories and high flying financial concepts, like derivatives and default swaps which should not be allowed to exist.

And we're watching this financial Silent Spring implode right before our eyes. A $700 billion or $7 trillion dollar bailout will only stave off the inevitable. Allowing these massive mergers will cost tens of thousands of jobs, create massive excess commercial real estate vacancies and ultimately condense power to a smaller, less diverse group of megacorporations.

This is bad for consumers, taxpayers, America, international finance and humanity. So maybe, totally unintentionally, McCain, the idiot cowboy, is doing some good. Maybe like Parsifal, the fool who finds the holy grail, he's doing some good, forcing the Democrats to take another look, rather that doing their usual-- make some noise than give Dubya what he's asked for. So far, it looks like the Republicans have out-finessed the Dems in congress.

I wrote earlier that any good lawyer knows that whoever writes the first draft of any deal has the advantage. The Dems and Republicans in congress need to throw out Paulson's proposal and come up with a new solution-- one that rewards the smart companies with good leaders that have weathered this crisis because of good judgment and strategic planning. It is idiocy to pour more money into the failing companies. The urgent need is to maintain liquidity-- keep the loans flowing. The solution is to support the winners, not the losers.

What kind of message does it send to responsible companies when the losers are rewarded? The answer is to allow the failures to fail and reward the strong, responsible companies. That seems so simple. Why can't the members of congress get it?

One word-- lobbyists.