The Republican Bush administration will have run up the national debt from -0- to almost $11 trillion in just eight years. The Democrats have had the majority in Congress for only the last two of those years--much of the financial damage was already done. Our GOP-lead government never anticipated the implosion of the debt markets, even though an ultimate "accounting" was inevitable and forewarnings issued by many.

It was the Bush administration that removed any cooperation in our elected bodies and replaced it with partisan and highly polarized governance. Even though the current crisis is the most serious in decades, the most conservative in the House are still blocking any agreement because of their unwillingness to abandon oreven modify their ideaology.

It was the Bush administration who quietly but effectively reduced or eliminated the guts of our government regulations in any number of areas--bank regulation, consumer safety, food and drug administration, the environment, occupational safety, and on and on.

It has been the Bush administration that has set the lowered moral bar for any government of a developed country. Fully 5% of the Republican members of Congress have been investigated, indicted, convicted or imprisoned during the Bush administration. Then there is Abu Graib and Guantanamo and the fabricated reasons for the Iraq War. The number of lobbyists has quadrupled on Bush's watch because it's clear they can get what they want for their special interest clients.

The Democrats should not be spared great criticism for complicity in all the deterioration in the last eight years. They were there and they either participated or stood by and watched.

But if there are partisans who are most responsible to delaying the much-needed legislation to stabilize the financial markets, its the far right members of the Congress who desire no intervention at all and are blocking any efforts to craft some stabilizing plan. When our investment portfolios are halved, when we can't get mortgage or car loans, when our kids are laid off from their jobs, when our own standard of living is changed--we should probably conclude that we weren't partisan enough!

"The same people who got us into this mess are the ones they have put out front to tell us they are going to get us out of it..." Gee, who might that be? Wasn't it George Bush, Dick Cheney, a string of ineffective cabinet officers at best and devious and even evil cabinet oficers at worst, hundreds of appointees who gutted government departments on their watch, who might share a lot of the blame for this situation? Isn't the plan put forth one designed by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary? And aren't those blocking its passage members of the President's own party? The Democrats have done a lot of things wrong, but the way I see the current dilemma, the inability to get bailout legislation passed is mostly being caused by the Republican members of the House.