Here's some imporant things from
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"The fury reached a pinnacle on Friday when Congress suddenly rebelled and refused to rubber-stamp the proposed $700 billion deal. Surely the climax of the day, and possibly the low point in the eight years of the Bush administration, was the moment when the Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, got down on his knees in front of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and begged her not to block the plan.
There are many reasons why the Wall Street spectacle has created so much antagonism while the World Trade Centre attacks created so much unity, but two matter in particular.
The first concerns what can only be called comprehensibility. Everyone watched those planes hit the skyscrapers, and everyone understood what it meant. By contrast, I don't believe many American congressmen, let along many American voters, really understand the credit crisis, or why it is unravelling so fast.
Nor, let's face it, do many people really understand the proposed bail-out deal. What does a sum like $700 billion, a number apparently plucked out of the air, actually mean? And why didn't the people who now say they know how to spend it do something to prevent the current crisis from happening in the first place?
Things might be different if the nation were led, at the moment, by an administration with a reputation for honesty and competence.
But this, too, is different: in 2001, President Bush still had the support of the majority of the nation, and thus had a wide mandate to deal with the post-9/11 crisis. He no longer has that support and he no longer has that mandate. No one any longer trusts his administration's military and foreign policy leaders. Why should we trust his administration's financial appointees either?"