Henry Paulson's main claim to fame is getting just about everything wrong in his tenure as Treasury secretary. However, he now stands to gain lasting notoriety as the person who destroyed the domestic U.S. auto industry, and the economies of the Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana along with them.

The story is that the big three automakers are struggling with record sales declines. This collapse in car sales in turn is the fallout from the collapse of the Greenspan-Bernanke housing bubble. While the domestic automakers have been hit hardest, all manufacturers have seen sharp drops in sales. Toyota's sales were down 23.0 percent compared with its year ago levels. Honda's sales were down 25.2 percent, and Nissan's sales fell 33.0 percent.

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The headline of a front page article in the Washington Post tells readers how Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson changed his approach to the economy in response to "this storm."

That is so sweet of the Post. We are looking at an entirely preventable economic catastrophe that was brought on by the policies supported by Mr. Paulson and the rest of the Bush administration, as well the Greenspan-Bernanke Fed. And, these were policies that Mr. Paulson personally profited from, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in his years at Goldman Sachs.

But in order to avoid reminding readers of Mr. Paulson's culpability, the Post describes the economic crisis as a "storm," implying that it was some sort of unforeseeable natural disaster that came out of the sky. This is the sort of reporting that you would have expected from Pravda in the days of the Soviet Union.

Remember way back in October when all right-minded people supported Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bank bailout package, which went under the name of Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP)? Those of us who thought it was poorly designed as a mechanism to help the financial system, and was likely to lead to taxpayer enrichment of the extremely rich, were denounced as knuckle-scraping Neanderthals.

Of course Paulson changed course a week after he got his bailout bill and decided that the best route was to directly inject capital into the banks, as advocated by the knuckle-scraping Neanderthals. Last week the knuckle-scraping Neanderthals could claim a second victory as he announced that the TARP program was officially dead, RIP.

But in Washington, no bad idea stays dead for long.

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