If you haven't yet read today's Prowler column about how Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel manipulated the defeat of the bailout bill, please do so. This rather confirms my own hunch:
It was as if the whole point of Monday's vote was to embarrass John McCain. The GOP nominee having identified himself so strongly with the bailout, a defeat for the bailout was a defeat for McCain, and the Democrats saw a chance to make him look like an idiot.Bailout supporter Megan McArdle attributes the failure to incompetence, rather than malice. While I have no problem conceiving of Pelosi as incompetent, where Rahm Emanuel's involved, malice seems a more likely explanation.