Haw.

Meanwhile, the increasingly disappointing -- though, admittedly, still funny -- Barney Frank is a portrait of a man not getting it:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the Financial Services Committee chairman who led negotiations with Paulson, said most lawmakers who did not agree that the crisis was immediate helped bring down the legislation. "We have some people who said they don't believe there will be a reaction. And to some extent, reality is going to be the arbiter," Frank said.

Ah, yes. "Reality." But in the empire today, "We create our own reality" -- a classic expression of the worldview of the financial gamblers whose toxic derivatives got us into this mess.* A reality that can be easily manipulated by strategic behavior, as Ian Welsh points out:

The problem was that banks aren’t lending to each other. This isn’t because they fear that other banks won’t repay if they fail, in every case when a bank has failed, the Fed has made sure that banks with outstanding interbank loans got their money back. So this isn’t a question of systemic risk causing fear.

Instead the fact of the matter is that banks can make more money lending elsewhere and, more importantly, by causing the system to seize up they were making it likely that they’d get a huge, oh 700 billion to 1.5 trillion dollar bailout. Whatever you can get for lending overnight to other banks kind of pales in comparison.

Market manipulation to drive the political process? I'm shocked.

Again, seriously, if the money guys and the insiders can cause others pain, the government is going to give them a trillion dollars. Isn't that worth turning the knobs up to 11? Especially when the electrical wires are hooked up to somebody else's stones and our famously free press will muffle the screams?

Come on, Barney! Let's pay a little attention to the men behind the curtain who're getting all the Village shills to scream "Trouble with a capital T!"

NOTE * Because what, after all, does the infestment banker who gets a ratings agency to mark derivative junk AAA, and then sells that junk for an AAA price, but "creating our own reality"?