The first House vote on the bailout just failed, 208-225. Repub­li­can con­gress­men voted against it by a two-to-one margin. This would seem to be a prob­lem, not only for the rest of us, who will suffer for it, but also for Repub­li­can politicians.

So what do you do if you’re a Repub­li­can con­gress­man? Do you accept some respon­si­bil­ity for the fiasco? Of course not. You, the party of macho moose hunters and multi-​day snow­ma­chine racers, blame the tone of Nancy Pelosi’s pre-​vote speech:

Some mem­bers of the House GOP are blam­ing Speaker Pelosi’s hard-​edged par­ti­san speech for the loss.

“Progress had been marked by mag­namin­ity with Frank, and Hoyer … Hers (speech) had a par­ti­san tone,” said Rep. Adam Putnam.

Sud­denly the endur­ing pop­u­lar­ity of the Repub­li­can party makes com­plete sense to me: being a con­ser­v­a­tive means never having to take respon­si­bil­ity for anything.

P.S. I’d sure love to be there for the Boehner-​McCain phone call that is prob­a­bly hap­pen­ing, oh, right about now.

++++++++

Second Quick Update (#1 below): McCain’s cam­paign is giving it a whirl as well, blam­ing Pelosi’s tone and (sur­prise!) Obama for the House Republicans’ vote:

Just before the vote, when the out­come was still in doubt, Speaker Pelosi gave a strongly worded par­ti­san speech and poi­soned the outcome.

This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democ­rats put pol­i­tics ahead of country.

Good luck with that one, guys.

++++++++

Third Quick Update: Seems there is at least one honest Repub­li­can left. Cour­tesy of The Corner:

Rich – I’m afraid Rep. Frank has a point on this one. Some feel­ings on the GOP side were hurt, so they voted against the eco­nomic well-​being of the country?

Sincerely,

A very con­cerned GOP staffer.

++++++++

Quick Update: What do you do if you’re a Demo­c­rat in Con­gress? Noah Mill­man has the answer:

The Democ­rats met the Admin­is­tra­tion more than halfway, and the GOP lead­er­ship could not deliver the promised 80 votes. Tomor­row, the Democ­rats intro­duce their own bill, pass it on a party-​line vote, and dare the Admin­is­tra­tion to veto.

There are lots and lots of rea­sons not to like this bill. But most of those rea­sons are Demo­c­ra­tic talk­ing points. The GOP alter­na­tive pro­posal was bor­der­line illiterate.

While they’re at it, you’d hope that they’d go ahead and do it right, nation­al­iz­ing and recap­i­tal­iz­ing fail­ing banks as Yves Smith and Nouriel Roubini and Paul Krug­man have been advo­cat­ing. Odds of that hap­pen­ing? I’m going with zero to none.