As a person experienced in having guns put to my head, I can say this:

Make it clear that you want them to shoot you. Then ask them to explain why they want to do it. And if what they want is only money, give it to them. Arguments can result in a hole in your head. It's pretty intense to approach it that way, but I've always survived it.

But they're the guy with the bomb on the plane. If they go down, we all do. So we have to give them what they want*. It's too bad we had to make the deal even worse to get more Republicans to go along.

The only solution here is to maintain credit flow until we have a real solution. And we don't have one yet. But we don't even have a chance at a solution if we don't have our finance system in order. Nobody likes the bailout, but everybody will suffer if we don't do it. You may be beholden to Smith's principles, but the rest of us need to live in the real world. We need financing for our inventions. If you want us engineers to develop products, you really need to open up financing. The credit crunch is hitting the most important facet of our society: innovation.

I'm not surprised that you don't care about that. What surprises me is that you come from a Bill Buckley style conservatism (no longer present at the NRO). You should want our financial system stabilized so that the money necessary to develop new products would flow. But you would sacrifice economic development on the altar of Adam Smith. The truth is that world works in both competitive and cooperative ways. John Nash proved that, and the markets have proven it. And damn near everyone who has worked in game theory has proven it.

And what the current situation proves is that the assumptions used to define acceptable leveraging weren't acceptable. And you can blame John Snow for it. The Democrats certainly deserve responsibility for not filibustering his nomination, but Bush certainly gets some blame for nominating him.