They say the even crazy people can be right at lease once and this time it has been our darling crazy, Michele Bachmann.

Ms. Bachmann voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) "both times," she boasts, and she has no regrets since Congress "just gave the Treasury a $700 billion blank check." She complains that no one bothered to ask about the constitutionality of these extraordinary interventions into the financial markets. "During a recent hearing I asked Secretary [Timothy] Geithner three times where the constitution authorized the Treasury's actions, and his response was, 'Well, Congress passed the law.'" Insufficient focus on constitutional limits to federal power is a Bachmann pet peeve. "It's like when you come up to a stop sign and you're driving. Some people have it in their mind that the stop sign is optional. The Constitution is government's stop sign. It says, you--the three branches of government--can go so far and no farther. With TARP, the government blew through the Constitutional stop sign and decided 'Whatever it takes, that's what we're going to do.'" Does this mean she would have favored allowing the banks to fail? "I would have. People think when you have a, quote, 'bank failure,' that that is the end of the bank. And it isn't necessarily. A normal way that the American free market system has worked is that we have a process of unwinding. It's called bankruptcy. It doesn't mean, necessarily, that the industry is eclipsed or that it's gone. Often times, the phoenix rises out of the ashes."

It became apparent that the main reason for TARP was NOT to save our banks, per se' but to save those of Europe or more specifically the European Union.

A congressional watchdog criticized, Thursday, the US government's handling of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was set up as a $700 billion rescue fund for ailing local financial firms in 2008, saying it aided banks in foreign countries more than rescue programs of other countries helped US businesses. The Congressional Oversight Panel accused, Thursday, the US Treasury of mishandling TARP money, saying that foreign banks received far more help from the US rescue effort than local financial firms did. The panel cited, for instance, the rescue case of troubled insurer American International Group (AIG). Even as the US government "bore the entire $70 billion risk of the AIG capital injection program," banks in France and Germany turned out to be the biggest beneficiaries, the panel said.

But this will not succeed any more than it did here as we watch EU member states fold under weight of the debt incurred by their own financial follies and the greed and opportunism of the self same banks. TARP did not then save the economy but rather postponed the consequences of the laissez-faire economics of the last 3 decades. I do not agree with anything else that either Bachmann or any of there other Teabagging right wing comes up with. In this one case though, her assessment is pretty much spot one. But then it is also said that an infinite number on monkeys will eventually come up with a script to Desperate Housewives.