VOLUNTARY CONSERVATION OF HOUSEHOLD ENERGY IS LOOKING PRETTY DAMN GOOD ABOUT NOW. Well, looks as if they heard me. But there's no point in celebrating -- some version of the "crap sandwich," almost certainly with extra crap, will pass this week. Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Jose Serrano and a few others may be dissenting in earnest, but I'm sure most of these guys are just working angles.

Playful as I have been on this subject, I don't really want things to get worse even to get better. I'm still convinced that a big bath is coming, and the current shenanigans will only postpone the inevitable, but I honestly appreciate and sympathize with the candor of Ross Douthat when he says, "If the defeat of the bailout is a victory for liberty, it's a victory whose costs I'm not prepared to bear." Maybe that's because, like Douthat (though for different reasons), I'm accustomed to read the crackpot millenarian Rod Dreher, whose hope for a brotherhood of godly paupers after the collapse of the world economy usually stirs me to reactionary consumerism. If our dysfunctional politics has made it impossible to strike a balance between the good and the bountiful, I'd rather reform the politics than celebrate the collapse as a way of getting back to neutral. (Interestingly, I see Dreher now wants us all to "pray for stability.")

The problem with the payoff plan is that it allows an end run around reform. To this moment, conservatives are more dedicated to the go-go economy than to the citizens who are supposed to be its beneficiaries. Megan McArdle compares the anti-bailout movement to the mice of fable who resolved to bell the cat, but had no means to do it. That's a hell of an analogy: the citizens of an alleged republic are mice and the economy a monster that will kill them if they attempt even the slightest modification of its lethal power.

I'm sorry FDR isn't around to get a laugh out of it. Hell, maybe I should send it to Jimmy Carter -- and include some of the columns in which McArdle tries to scare us with stories of 70s inflation -- to whom it may give at least a rueful chuckle. After all, he was the guy we blew off in order to embark on our long binge of deregulation and market-worship. Maybe the spectacle of an MBA President vainly trying to get fellow Republicans to support a Wall Street bailout has already got him doubled over. At the very least he must be thanking God for allowing him to live this long.

I have no faith that the current batch of Democrats can put even a little more muscle in the bill, but I wish they'd try. Conservatives are reduced to trying to convince people that the system is in collapse because Democrats made banks give money to Negroes and hire homosexuals. If not now, when?