Hidden in an article reporting that Cheney’s going to go hunt up some support for the $700,000,000,000 bailout is this admission that the Bush Administration has been sitting on it for some time:

Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough. [my emphasis]

Which raises three questions for me:

A) First, as we’ll discuss today in the book salon on Woodward’s War Within, the Bush Administration refused to admit Iraq was FUBAR even while, for seven months, they were drumming up a new strategy because it was FUBAR. They did so because they didn’t want to affect the mid-term elections.  So has the Bush Administration been formulating a plan to bail out their buddies, in secret, because they didn’t want to let the voters know how badly they had fucked up the American economy before November?

B) And if that is true, how much worse has the economy gotten–and how much more expensive will the bailout be–because the Bushies were trying to hide yet another colossal Republican failure?

C) Or, did they simply not tell us about their fuck-up so they could spring the $700,000,000,000 surprise on us on a Friday and demand results by Monday? The Shock Doctrine at work!

Though, I guess “A” and “C” are not necessarily either/or propositions.