Pretty incredible read:

“We’re in a serious economic crisis,” Mr. Bush told reporters as the meeting began shortly before 4 p.m. in the Cabinet Room, adding, “My hope is we can reach an agreement very shortly.”

But once the doors closed, the smooth-talking House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, surprised many in the room by declaring that his caucus could not support the plan to allow the government to buy distressed mortgage assets from ailing financial companies.

Mr. Boehner pressed an alternative that involved a smaller role for the government, and Mr. McCain, whose support of the deal is critical if fellow Republicans are to sign on, declined to take a stand.

The talks broke up in angry recriminations, according to accounts provided by a participant and others who were briefed on the session, and were followed by dueling news conferences and interviews rife with partisan finger-pointing.

In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.”

It's an extraordinary and disturbing spectacle that's going on now, with this White House unable to convince even and especially its own party to rescue what they argue is essentially the country's financial liquidity. All these years of gratuitous demagoguery, ideological rigidity, ultra-partisanship, secrecy, cronyism, lying, attacks on dissent and the media and immigrants and calling concerns about torture and domestic spying treasonous, it all just comes down to total bankruptcy and weakness and pleas to any and all in the end to please help. Extend them the reasonableness, the decency, the good will that in the almost fascistic overreach of their high power days they never considered extending, they sneered at. They presided over the destruction of so much they touched, sometimes on a cataclysmic scale; and now they are weak and have made this country weaker and more vulnerable before its adversaries to a degree unimaginable a decade ago. Such deeply, deeply irresponsible men.

Update: More from John Judis: "Putting Country Last."

Posted by Laura at September 25, 2008 11:03 PM