Politics and Culture

(CNN) -- A rapidly deteriorating situation in the U.S. auto industry may serve as the backdrop for a classic contest of political wills between the outgoing Bush administration on one hand and both President-elect Obama and the newly strengthened Democratic congressional majority on the other.
Congress may reconvene next week to tackle the troubled auto industry's financial woes.

Congress may reconvene next week to tackle the troubled auto industry's financial woes.

If President Bush refuses to help bail out the struggling Big Three automakers, the Democratic leadership is promising that it will do so, most likely in the form of a lame-duck session convened as early as next week.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a statement released Tuesday afternoon, called on key congressional leaders to work with the Bush administration "to craft legislation to provide emergency and limited financial assistance to the automobile industry under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act."

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Here we go! Instead of allowing the auto industry to declare bankruptcy and actually fix its problems, the new Obama government will now do for it what it's done for single mothers and every other group or individual with a behavior-based dysfunction: enable!

Why will the auto industry perform better having been guaranteed not to fail than it would have with the hounds of competition on their tail?

This is why Obama's denunciations of lobbyists is so hilarious. How does the government decide whom to help, whom to allow to fail? Metaphorically, the squeakiest wheel. Practically, the ones with the most persuasive lobbyists or most constituents or closest friends to those in power. Performance is now nearly irrelevant now that the market's not a factor.

Corporate welfare gone mad.