Aww, no fair! Paulson's getting all the credit for the Great Bank Robbery of 2008! So says one of Jim Cramer's henchmen. (Note: I no longer read or listen to Cramer AT ALL, but this is a loophole since I'm not quoting him directly.) Anyway listen to this guy:

I know we've spent every night talking about the Paulson bailout plan (or Invest In America Plan as we call it) ever since the rumors about it started last week, but to be fair, we've actually been talking about this plan, or something like it for months. Ever since March, if not earlier, Jim's been calling for the government to buy mortgages and mortgage-backed paper, and starting around July 16 he called for the creation of a Mortgage Resolution Trust almost every show. If we were the kind of egomaniacal people who demanded credit for every idea we pushed that eventually got adopted or at least proposed, we wouldn't have room for anything else on the show.

But just to be clear, this has been on your TV screen for months, and it should've been on someone's radar. Jim is a cable TV host and he's been pushing a plan similar to Paulson's for months, but Congress was blindsided by this? Come on. So for people who act like Paulson's plan came out of nowhere, even though we've been suggesting the government do this for months, come on! If there's any fault, it's with the administration for waiting so long before putting this plan forward. Lehman...and AIG...had to go down, not to mention Fannie...and Freddie...before they were scared enough to realize that, yes, we have a big, systemic problem.

Funny that an administration so sold on preemptive war has been so incapable of taking preemptive action when it comes to the economy.

Don't you love that last line? It's akin to Bill Kristol saying, "We were saying for years that the US should invade Iraq. It's too bad the World Trade Centers had to come down before people took our warnings of WMD seriously."

Incidentally, as I write the S&P500 is down more than 3.5%, and the credit markets are worse than they were last week.