Sinfest has captured the essence of the bailout in comic form. What brave new theory permits contradictory gems like:

The US Government is to spend up to $250 billion buying direct stakes in banks and other financial institutions under a controversial emergency plan which President Bush insisted today was “not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it”.

One does not take over free markets to save them. It was and still is government intervention in the first place that is destroying the free markets. The root cause of the mess we are in is fractional reserve lending, an unsound currency, and interest rate micro-mismanagement by the Fed.