Though he's no Joe Nocera, Frank Rich asks some pointed questions and wonders about dirty little secrets:

its hard to imagine taxpayers shelling out billions for a second bank bailout unless theres a full accounting of every dime of the first, and true transparency for the new plan whose rollout is becoming the most attenuated striptease since the heyday of Gypsy Rose Lee.Another compelling question connects all of the above: why has there been so little transparency and so much evasiveness so far? The answer, I fear, is that too many of the administrations officials are too marinated in the insiders culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it.The dirty little secret, Obama told Leno on Thursday, is that most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal. An even dirtier secret is that a prime mover in keeping that stuff legal was Summers, who helped torpedo the regulation of derivatives while in the Clinton administration. His mentor Robert Rubin, no less, wrote in his 2003 memoir that Summers underestimated how the risk of derivatives might multiply under extraordinary circumstances.Given that Summers worked for a secretive hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, after he was pushed out of Harvards presidency at the bubbles height, you have to wonder how he can now sell the administrations plan for buying up toxic assets with the help of hedge funds. It will look like another giveaway to his own insiders club. As for Geithner, people might take him more seriously if he gave a credible account of why, while at the New York Fed, he and the Goldman alumnus Hank Paulson let Lehman Brothers fail but saved the Goldman-trading ally A.I.G.

The rest is here.