Bernanke?

Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, has been often criticized for his role as Fed Chairman in the current crisis and in the handling of the "Recovery Plan." Others credit him for helping America avoid a severe depression. I am tremendously skeptical of the Federal Reserve's role in the "recovery." Actually, I think that the recession/depression will be longer due to the Federal Reserve and the stimulus plan. Unemployment today--with the stimulus plan--is higher than the predicted unemployment rate made before the stimulus package for a stimulus-less scenario. This same prediction was used to justify the plan and to create a sense of urgency. This should tell us a few things: economic forecasting is hard if not impossible; we should be aware of incentives at play when an administration comes out with an economic forecast--in other words, politicians are concerned with passing their agenda not with the truth. This is not only true for Obama, but for Bush and most other politicians, as well.
But I digress. Obama plans to nominate Bernanke as Fed chairman. Bernanke has changed the role of the Federal Reserve Bank from a secretive central banking agency that controls and inflates the American currency to a central planning agency that controls and hyperinflates the American currency AND bails out mismanaged corporations. Even if Bernanke is responsible for the stabilization of the stock market, why should this be celebrated? If we all gave our money to corporations we would expect corporations to be wealthier and in better conditions. But the stock market does not measure the health of the economy; it is one market that shows the anticipated profitability of corporations. It is wrong to conflate the two.
The Federal Reserve must be audited and destroyed. The Federal Reserve is destroying the value of our currency, and it allows politicians to partake in huge deficit spending. Inflation is essentially a secret tax, and the existence of the Federal Reserve Bank allows politicians to make promises for new spending while never focusing on the tax side of the issue. This permits deficit spending and politicians almost never have to face their constituents with a potential tax increase.
I am not even a sound money advocate. I actually think that Fiat currency could arise in a world with free banking. I believe and advocate for a free banking system, or, maybe more pragmatically? as Milton Friedman suggested before his death , a fixed money supply growth system where the money supply increases by a certain amount each year. If there is one thing that this current recession/depression should teach us, it is that the Federal Reserve bank cannot be trusted with fine tuning our economy through the control of the money supply.