“If you prefer irony to panic, you might consider the peculiar spectacle of the current administration, a bitter opponent of the New Deal, deploying the full force of the New Deal’s legacy to stave off the financial crisis. We’ve been bailing like it’s 1933, with the Exchange Stabilization Fund joining the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee in an effort to stop credit from vanishing. And now Congress has provided an emergency-relief program of the kind that made the New Deal work. But can New Deal programs succeed without New Dealers running them? Judging by the last time Americans tried it, during Herbert Hoover’s last year of office, the answer is, sadly, no.” [editor’s note: Which is (at least for now) our only hope, since a “new New Deal” requires a “new WWII[I]” to obscure out of the mess it creates - SAT] (10/09/08)