As Congress debates whether to hand over a $700,000,000,000 check to the Bush administration with no strings attached, conservatives are already arguing that none of that money should end up in the hand of regular people:

On Sunday Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson resisted suggestions that the program be changed to include further relief for homeowners facing mortgage foreclosures.

Mr. Paulson said Sunday that because financial markets remain under severe stress there is an urgent need for Congress to act quickly without adding other measures that could slow down passage. "We need this to be clean and to be quick," Mr. Paulson said in an interview on ABC's "This Week."

Mr. Paulson said he was concerned that debate over adding all of those proposals would slow the economy down, delaying the rescue effort that is so urgently needed to get financial markets moving again.

"The biggest help we can give the American people right now is to stabilize the financial system," Mr. Paulson said.

Shorter Paulson: Giving all the money to the people who caused this crisis is the best way for the masses to help themselves. Ain't trickle-down economics grand?

Conservatives created this crisis with a policy of deregulation - which allowed companies to become "too big to fail" - combined with a love for public/private partnerships like Fannie Mae, in which government acts as the implicit firewall in the markets, ready to step in and "bail out" when things inevitably go wrong.

And when the crisis inevitably comes, conservatives argue all the money needs to go back into the hands that created the crisis because the bailout needs to be "clean and quick." And of course, a "long" discussion on meaningful regulation, corporate accountability, and wise use of taxpayer money would only make things worse.

We see this modus operandi over and over again from the right wing. And we'll see it happen with health care in 2009.

With the next President inheriting staggering debt from President Bush, conservatives will suddenly remember their fiscal mantra and decry any "extra" spending. If they're particularly brazen, you'll see them calling for a set of laws that make it easier for private health care corporations to make more money - giving more wealth to the very powers that caused our current health care crisis.

Senator John McCain said it best (thanks, Todd):

Here's what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago -- and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!

Conservatives will abolish geographic restrictions on health care purchasing, allowing companies to set up shop in states with the most favorable regulations, get rid of employer-based health insurance and tax your health care benefits, and then offer you a piddling tax credit to get through it all. It all adds up to more money in the hands of insurance companies and less in the hands of working people - socialism for the rich spurred on by a "crisis." It's the shock doctrine.

Don't let them get away with it.

It's extremely telling that there is a bottomless pit of money when that money is going to corporate backers of the conservative movement, but when that money just might find its way into the hands of hard working Americans, suddenly the well is dry. (Paulson even had the nerve to suggest stripping Wall Street CEOs of their multi-million dollar severance packages was enough to doom a bailout bill.)

Let's face facts. Conservatives don't want to "solve the crisis" (any crisis) or help make America stronger. They simply want to use a crisis (that they create) to give more money to themselves. This isn't about helping the country, this isn't about averting a depression, this is about stealing as much money as they can and getting away with it. Conservatives use times of crisis to fundamentally undermine our democracy. And when talk turns to giving money to the people - be it in the form of economic stimulus, health care, energy, or poverty reduction - conservatives suddenly get that old time fiscal conservative religion.

The sooner progressives, our elected leaders, and the media realize conservatives are trying to destroy our country, not save it, the better.