Conservative Pundits Rail Against Bailout

The Bush administration’s $700 billion financial bailout plan seems destined to make it through Congress, but even conservative pundits are bashing the desperate move:

• If a Democratic administration were proposing this plan, a Republican Congress would shoot it down, writes Newt Gingrich in the National Review. "Congress was designed by the Founding Fathers to move slowly, precisely to avoid the sudden panic of a one-week solution that becomes a 20-year mess."

• William Kristol, in the New York Times, says the experts he’s consulted don’t believe Hank Paulson “has even the basics right.”
• The rush to bailout bears striking similarities to the rush into the Iraq war, writes Dennis Dale in the American Conservative. Now as then, vast expansions of power are being rushed through, and “questioning the consensus is all but forbidden.”

(More bailout stories.)