Monster Response to a Pygmy Problem

    In typical fashion, our elected representatives in Washington are doing all they can to distract attention from their own Profligate, Porcine spending by expressing outrage at a tiny percentage of waste occuring in the boardrooms of private business.  Charles Krauthammer has an article today at Townhall.com describing the hypocrisy:

"A $14 trillion economy hangs by a thread composed of (a) a comically cynical, pitchfork-wielding Congress, (b) a hopelessly understaffed, stumbling Obama administration, and (c) $165 million.  That's $165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built. Now, in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It's less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone."

    So where does the blame belong for this particular waste?  Is it with the people who received these bonuses?  They had contracts with their employers before the bailout.  Congress, the Administration, and the Treasury Department had to know (or should have known) about it.  What are we paying these bureaucrats for, if not that?  No, they had to pass the Stimulus bill without time even to read, let alone evaluate, the thing.  So now Congress is pushing through a bill to extract the money legally paid to these people.  First Congress will abrogate legal contracts, what's next?  What other parts of the Constitution will be rendered 'null and void' just because a populist president and a myopic congress, aided and abetted by a puckish press, are able to rile up the citizenry to a fever pitch on such a triviality? 

    Mona Charen has also written an article in which she compares the actions of those in private business, now being bailed out, with those of the politicians that some say pushed the private businesses to take the actions they did.  Her article concludes:

    "... the most sinister move came from Frank. He demanded that Liddy reveal the names of the 73 executives who had received retention bonuses. Liddy said he would do so if he could receive a promise of confidentiality. Frank refused and threatened to subpoena the names. Liddy said if subpoenaed he would obey the law, but he then read to the committee some of the death threats his company had been getting over the past few days. Some threats spoke of hanging the executives with piano wire, others of finding where their kids went to school.

    That is the sort of ugliness and criminality that Frank is willing tacitly to encourage by demanding the names. And for what? The bonuses amounted to just one tenth of 1 percent of the AIG bailout (to say nothing of the stimulus bill and the gargantuan budget bill Congress and the president are hanging around our necks). If politicians want to metaphorically flay away at evil businessmen, well, that's regrettable. But when they cross the line into encouraging the targeting of actual individuals, they are no longer 'honorable gentlemen,' but leaders of a mob."

    Read these articles, then consider the duplicity of these corrupt and contentious idiots we've elected.  And consider the fallen nature of mankind that leads to the mob mentality being appealed to by those we've put in positions of power.  One Tenth of One Percent!  What have we become?

"What Were You Thinking?"