A man is walking into the hospital where his wife had been admitted the day before. She was being treated for high blood pressure and a slightly irregular heart rhythm. As the man arrives, he sees the doctor who had been treating his wife being led out of the hospital by security, with the doctor muttering "it was just once...it was just once.."

The man gets to his wife's hospital room to find a team of doctors and nurses around her. She is unconscious and attached to a heart-lung machine...obviously in far worse shape than how she arrived.

The senior doctor in the room sees the man and takes him aside to explain what's happened:

Man: I saw Doctor Bosh leaving the hospital with security, and now this! What the hell is going on?

Doctor: Sir, there's no easy way to explain it, but Doctor Bosh somehow got it in his head that curing you're wife's high blood pressure was the ultimate goal, even surpassing his Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. So he gave your wife a combination of drugs which fixed her blood pressure and heart rhythm, at least temporarily, and which seemed to work perfectly for a brief time, but which then caused your wife to lapse into a coma.

Man: Oh my god! That son-of-a-bitch! What exactly is my wife's current situation and what's going to happen?

Doctor: The good news is that there does not seem to be permanent brain damage, though while in a coma it's always very hard to tell and the longer she's in a coma the more likely it is that something slightly or very significant of a permanent nature has happened. I'm only aware of one prior case like this, and it happened more than 50 years ago. That patient is still alive today, and has done quite well, though not without a few lasting ill effects. The difference is basically only in the combination of drugs that was used on the patient...so in that sense your wife's case is unique. We need to determine what combination of antidote drugs and rehabilitation therapy is most likely to bring your wife back, but I need you to realize that even the best possible recovery will likely leave her not quite the same person as before. And it is possible that she could come out of the coma and have the blood pressure and heart issues return, but at least she'll be conscious and we can deal with those by more rational means.

Man: This is unbelievable, ridiculous, outrageous...there really aren't words to properly describe it! What an utter betrayal by Dr. George Bosh! Even if my wife recovers fully, I'll never forgive him. He has betrayed everything a doctor is supposed to be, and all the trust we placed in him.

Doctor: I know...I know. I'm so sorry, sir. All I can tell you is that we'll do our best to save your wife.

Man: But many of your staff have worked with Dr. Bosh for years, and some even trained the same places he did. How do I know that they won't just make the problem worse?

Doctor: Sir, you'll just have to trust me on that....

There are two possible outcomes to this story:

Outcome 1: The man and his wife are in their home, speaking, and living a nearly normal life. The wife walks with a limp and is unable to compete in the marathons which she used to regularly win. But she's conscious and is nearly her normal self.

Outcome 2: The man is looking at his wife who remains in a coma in a hospital bed. A doctor who had been trained in a sub-par foreign medical school attempted to cure the wife's coma with a second round of the same drugs that had put her in the coma. That doctor has also been fired, but the damage is done. The medical director of the hospital is telling the man that they're still optimistic that the wife will come out of the coma but that she'll almost certainly have substantial damage that will take at least a decade to recover from, and that full recovery is most likely out of the question.

I presume that anyone reading these pages is smart enough to understand my rather obvious allegory: The comatose wife is the US free-market economic system after President George W. Bush decided to bail out automakers with money from the TARP, the financial bailout fund created by Congress some months ago, along with Bush's statement that he had "abandoned free-market principles in order to save the free market." The husband is any business or entrepreneur who relies on our capitalist system and who knows that that system is the only way he can survive, or at least the only way he can reach his lofty goals. The Doctor is the incoming administration, especially its economic team.

Bush's move is economic treason, and it could be argued political treason as well given Bush's oath (which he's violated before) to protect and defend the Constitution. One can not save the free market by temporarily abandoning it. All one can do is cripple it for an unknown time into the future.

What particularly concerns me is that the incoming administration is more likely to continue giving economic long-term poison to the patient and that Outcome 2 is more likely than Outcome 1.

In any case, I have said for a few years that Bush's chief failure was his signing of McCain-Feingold while acknowledging that it is unconstitutional. That is now Bush's second-biggest failure and it pales in comparison with his biggest: His direct attack on our entire economic system along with words that appear to give aid and comfort to enemies of capitalism both here and abroad. There are two major reason that capitalism is so unpopular right now: One is that Democrats and their media stooges have people believing that President Bush's administration was characterized by widespread deregulation, so that a lack of regulation and a surplus of economic liberty is the cause of recent troubles. But that is absolutely untrue, with federal regulation growing at least as fast under Bush as under other recent administrations. And the second reason capitalism is unpopular is that the average citizen, poorly educated about economics, sees President Bush as capitalism's representative. It's like having Benedict Arnold as the representative of the American military during the revolution...most people wouldn't recognize the treasonous nature of the man; some will only have learned it in history books much later, and some will never understand the truth.

I couldn't be more disgusted with President Bush. I couldn't be happier that he's leaving. After this sad turn of events, it's hard to imagine that even our incoming socialist president could be much worse. Well, it's not that hard to imagine, but the lesser of two evils is still evil, and I remain exceptionally proud that I never voted for George W. Bush. Like the doctor who abandons the Hippocratic Oath, Bush abandoned capitalism and the Constitution at the same time. It may not be a hanging offense, but it certainly has earned Bush my everlasting enmity.