Mind-boggling idiocy and irresponsibility

TPMMuckraker finds this nugget in a New York Times story:

"Merrill traders resumed buying mortgage assets after the crisis in the housing market was already abundantly clear. After the government had taken over the mortgage lenders Fannie and Freddie. After Lehman Brothers had announced it was filing for bankruptcy. After the US government had effectively taken over AIG. Above all, after Merrill itself had been bought by Bank of America, with help from $25 billion of government money."

Useful comparisons

Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds offered the following insight into the U.S. war in Iraq:

"SO LAST NIGHT I FINISHED HARRY TURTLEDOVE’S The Man With the Iron Heart. it’s an alt-history story in which Reinhard Heydrich survived and led a post-VE-day insurgency in Germany, and a pretty obvious allegory for Iraq. I won’t give away the ending, but I’m happy to say that things have gone a lot better in Iraq than they do in Turtledove’s Germany. Like just about all Turtledove, it’s a good read, but it’s made more enjoyable by realizing that our outcome has been superior.

Posted at 9:21 am by Glenn Reynolds"

I think it also is worth noting that the response to Katrina was far superior to that of the government in a novel in which insurgent remnants of the Confederate army captured helicopters and strafed African-American hurricane survivors as they tried to escape the Convention Center. A good read, and it makes me feel better knowing our response was better.

[It was bad enough that apologists tried to spin the insurgency (in its early days) by falsely saying that it was similar to what went on in Germany after the war; now that that has long beeen debunked, I guess Instabunion figures he can try that spin again using 'alternative history.']