Bush, Paulson, and their T.A.R.P. of S.N.A.F.U. | BuzzFlash.org

via http://buzzflash.com/articles/carpenter/252

Let's just consider it their parting gift of wanton incompetence, the final bow of squalid mismanagement, the last tip 'o the hat to operatic farce and unaccountability.

As the Washington Post reports, while revealing no shock or even dismay: "The Bush administration has failed to adequately oversee its $700 billion bailout program."

Failure, inadequacy, lack of oversight -- three commonly referenced subjects in any story on the Bush regime, which parachute into the same inclusive sentence with almost perfunctory regularity and, after eight years, have devolved to the reportorial level of a yawning S.N.A.F.U.

What the Post takes note of, you see, is that the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has found there is no "guarantee that banks are complying with the plan's limits on conflicts of interest and lavish executive compensation."

What's more, the GAO's recently released investigative report "said the Treasury Department has yet to impose necessary safeguards or decide how to determine whether the program is achieving its goals."

The "evolving nature of the program," said the GAO, has "hampered efforts to put a comprehensive system of internal control in place." And "until such a system is fully developed and implemented, there is heightened risk that the interests of the government and taxpayers may not be adequately protected and that the program objectives may not be achieved in an efficient and effective manner."

Oh, stop. Please stop. You're killing me. What cards, those accountants at the GAO, what with their boundless sense of humor and playful bent for naked irony. To arms! To arms! The Bush Babies with machine guns lack "internal control"; they've put taxpayers at risk; they've thrown "adequate protections" overboard; they -- brace yourself -- don't seem all that "efficient and effective."

Hmmm. What a fine but familiar kettle of fish. Can you say, "Katrina"? Or, "fiscal responsibility"? Or, "Iraq"? Or "Afghanistan" or "Geneva Conventions" or "regulatory oversight" or "independent Justice Department"? If not, just say "S.N.A.F.U."

The proverbial roots of the many problems -- generally defined, simply, as wasteful impotence -- of the $700 billion bailout program, however, would seem to be wedged in the GAO and Post's terminology of "its goals" and "evolving nature."

You will recall the bailout's acronym: T.A.R.P., a tidy, self-explanatory little term that indicated a "relief program" would be established to -- what else? -- relieve banks of their "troubled assets."

Here, for instance, from ABC News, was concise reporting during the week of the bailout bill's Congressional passage: At "the heart of the bill" is the "plan to provide the Treasury with $700 billion to buy troubled assets from financial institutions -- an effort that proponents say will help ease the credit crunch by allowing banks to clear their balance sheets and lend money."

Good enough. That made sense. Banks weren't loaning to one another -- hence to you, or me, or anyone else -- because of their prodigiously valid concern that the institutional loan recipient might be as poisoned by lethally problematic assets as, let's say, Lehman Brothers was.

Consequently, or rather synonymously, credit markets were frozen. But hellfire, if Hank Paulson just relieved those institutions of their mortgage-related doubts, through complex but, we were told, ultimately workable reverse auctions, then the financial sewers would clear and the confidence skies would part and the reciprocal rivers would once again run green.

But in midcourse planning (to use a charitable term), Mr. Paulson instead began heaving mountains of cash on banks that hadn't even asked for the money. Just take it, he insisted -- no bad securities bought, but on the other hand no questions asked and no answers or guarantees demanded.

So they took it. And then, stunned by their good fortune, they kept it.

Meanwhile, those financial sewers still clogged with dubious mortgage-related securities are still running red, extending the period of no confidence in this wreck of an economy created largely by the Bush administration's wholesale absence of oversight and surfeit of farcical incompetence.

What a perfectly fitting, parting gift to the nation.