Did Obama just say he’d like to conduct GM-style bailouts in every manufacturing industry in the country?

GM, by the way, is in free fall. They’re still “profitable,” which considering that the taxpayers took a $35 BILLION – or maybe a lot bigger – bath on that company so that the United Auto Workers could more or less take it over and that Ally is giving 32-month vehicle leases at 30 percent of the vehicle’s true cost, but when you fall off by a billion dollars in a quarter year over year it’s just a matter of time before you’re in the red again.

So to tout this as an example of what you want to do with every manufacturer in the country isn’t going to play well. Not only is it going to get panned on the basis that the GM bailout wasn’t all that great a deal in the first place – and let’s not even get started on Chrysler, the effect of which bailout has been to enable Fiat to subject us to Charlie Sheen commercials in an attempt to sell toy cars to an American public which isn’t going to have any particular desire for them.

But the real reason this is a colossal gaffe by Obama is that it’s a signal once more that he’s a hard-core socialist who, if he gets a second term, is going to co-opt the private sector and transform the American economy into something that, frankly, Italian fascists would readily recognize.

Let’s not forget what happened to GM and Chrysler’s bondholders. They were screwed out of billions of dollars – and not only were they screwed financially, they were demonized by this White House in the process. Let’s say you’re a Boeing bondholder, or a John Deere bondholder, or a bondholder with Procter & Gamble, Dell, Caterpillar, International Paper – or whoever – does this idea of doing to you what Obama and his union pals did to GM’s bondholders make you happy? Think you’ll be putting your money behind American corporate bonds ever again if Obama gets re-elected?

There is no way this isn’t a game-changing mistake on Obama’s part. Every manufacturer in America just became a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. And it’s not as loopy as it used to be to say that you can either have a free-market American economy or Obama in the White House for the next four years – but not both.

The American people have never knowingly chosen a fascist economic system. It’s hard to imagine they would choose one now.