Krug­man, on last night’s bailout blowup:

How did we get to this point? It’s the cul­mi­na­tion of many past betrayals.

First of all, we have the Repub­li­can Study Com­mit­tee blow­ing things up with a com­plete non­sense pro­posal — solv­ing the crisis with a hol­i­day on cap­i­tal gains taxes. How is that pos­si­ble? Well, if a party runs on eco­nomic non­sense for 25 years, even­tu­ally many of its foot sol­diers will be people who actu­ally believe the nonsense.

More specif­i­cally, though, the fail­ure to get a deal reflects the betray­als of the Bush years. Democ­rats weren’t going to trust Henry Paul­son, because behind him they see the ghost of Colin Powell (and Paulson’s “all your bailout are belong to me” pro­posal, aside from being bad eco­nom­ics, showed an incred­i­ble tone-​deafness.)

And after the way the Bushies and their allies double-​crossed the Democ­rats again and again in the after­math of 9/11 — demand national unity, then accuse you of being soft on ter­ror­ists anyway — there’s no way Pelosi and Reid will do the respon­si­ble but unpop­u­lar thing unless the Repub­li­cans agree to share ownership.

So what we now have is non-​functional gov­ern­ment in the face of a major crisis, because Con­gress includes a quorum of cra­zies and nobody trusts the White House an inch.

As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana repub­lic with nukes.