I'm going to admit it.  I'm  prejudiced.  They say you should never judge a book by its cover.  I say you don't have to eat the whole apple to know its bad.  And once you've had a bad apple, you know what to look for so you don't have to go through that again.   You know the old saying... "Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me repeatedly for three and a half years and I'm just asking for it."

In the reality-based world, anticipating future events based on past experience is considered prudent risk management.  If you look at it from an evolutionary standpoint, it is a positive survival characteristic.  Here's why that's important...

TOO BIG TO FAIL.

That concept is as old as Goliath, but a hell of a lot more durable.  The term was popularized about 20 years ago when the Federal Reserve bailed out a Midwestern bank to (the then) unheard of tune of $1 Billion.  Congress was dismayed by this largesse and promptly held hearings.  

Appalled by the apparent socialist stench of this state intervention in private enterprise, the late Congressman McKinney (R-CT) uttered the now famous phrase:

"Mr. Chairman, We have a new kind of bank.  It is called,
"too big to fail," TBTF, and it is a wonderful bank."

You have to admit, the idea of Congress holding hearings to learn why a federal agency bailed out a private business like that is -- to borrow a phrase from Attorney General Gonzales -- quaint.  If a billion dollars of questionable spending was all it took to trigger hearings today, they would be having at least two hearings a week just on Iraq.