What a strange pass we are in. Our economy is in shambles – or at least we are told that it is – and we have a President without the basic common sense to prevent some of the very people who helped ruin it to be rewarded with millions of dollars. Meanwhile, we learn that our pockets – and the pockets of our children – are being raided to bail out foreign banks.
Yes, I know all this is a tad more complicated, but public perception (my perception and yours as well, for the most part) is substantially that. We have moved from someone who was inarticulate in the White House to someone who just… jabbers on. Barrack the Jabberer. It’s hard even to take seriously his “progressive” desire to reform America. It all seems like a pose – just like his outrage at the AIG Execs who are taking the over-sized bonuses. Wasn’t he aware of the effect of his own legislation?
But be grateful for this – at least Chris Dodd isn’t President!
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31 Comments
1. Promoguy:In articulate as he might have been, I understood what he was saying. He spoke straight and that counts.
Mar 17, 2009 - 10:25 am 2. Charlie Martin:The worst part is that most every bit of these perceptions about the AIG thing — and I agree that you’ve got the perception nailed — is at least a little wrong and some of it wildly wrong.
Sadly, the only people who seem to be willing to do the work to understand it don’t seem to be in Congress.
Mar 17, 2009 - 12:28 pm 3. David Thomson:“Wasn’t he aware of the effect of his own legislation?”
No, of course not. Barack Obama is a poorly read and shallow man. He focused on networking during his formal school years. I seriously doubt if he has ever heard of either Ludwig Von Mises or Friedrich Hayek. The very idea that there are normally unintended consequences when government interferes in the market place is an utterly alien concept.
Mar 17, 2009 - 12:31 pm 4. EdSki:This entire AIG out rage episode is nothing more than a carefully staged diversion to hide what’s really going on in Washington. The current incarnation of modern liberalism (as opposed to classical liberalism, which actually cared about things like liberty) needs to constantly have foils to hurl mock out rage against. First is was Bush & Cheney. Then it was evil Wall street. Then Rush. Now AIG.
I believe the left’s intention is to keep their voters running on righteous outrage and moral indignation. Strong emotions, but necessary to keep their base from calming down, and using logic and reason to evaluate the true situation.
I guarantee, the second their polls show this issue is no longer at blood boiling level, they’ll pick another target.
They probably thought they would get more mileage out of Rush, except they forgot, he fights back.
Mar 17, 2009 - 1:05 pm 5. Neobuzz:A couple of years ago, right after the 2006 mid-term election, Glenn Reynolds argued that from time to time the electorate needs to be reminded of the fecklessness of Democratic pols and policies through their election to high office. Now is that time. It may be uncomfortable to watch the inmates run the asylum, but it is a necessary part of the process. Spending two years as the opposition will also help Republicans remind themselves of something many seem to have forgotten: what it means to be conservative. Buck up, Roger, it will be over soon enough.
Mar 17, 2009 - 2:00 pm 6. Victor Erimita:He is nothing but a pose. Never has been. He is propped up by the posing industry: pundits, putative “news” organizations that we know promulgate no news, and perhaps the most absurd of all…comedians. The Mahers, Feys, Stewarts, Baldwins, SNLs and so on that, frighteningly, have become genuine arbiters of faux authenticity. The sultans of smirk. Poststructuralism has reached its goal, to replace any serious attempt at divining the truth with mere claims, poses, riffs. The spitball throwers are now teaching the class. Obama is the fruit of 30+ years of postmodern poststructuralist rot in our universities and pop culture. He is indeed The One they have been waiting for, The Crown of Destruction.
Like the concept of the “banality of evil,” the Great Transformer turns out to be a cardboard character with a head full of bumper sticker slogans, the epitome of the poststructuralist project.
At this point, the only really interesting question is whether there are enough Americans left who can tell the difference between smug, knowing looks, knowing poses, knowing sound bites and…knowing. And whether there is much left we can do about it, as our “leaders” fiendishly dismantle what is left of Enlightenment values, classical liberalism and what remains of the institutions they created. It’s both a silly and terrifying spectacle to watch.
Mar 17, 2009 - 3:51 pm 7. ricpic:The next trillion Obama & Co. steal will save us millions, millions!
Mar 17, 2009 - 4:27 pm 8. Henry Bowman:David Thomson is correct. Obama is truly, incredibly ignorant. The term ‘empty suit’ doesn’t begin to describe him. Even King George II seems better-informed.
Mar 17, 2009 - 7:26 pm 9. PC14:I think the very popular position involving Obama and those AIG bonuses is not being reported honestly by the press.
I assume most folks think of bonuses as some extra bucks your company pays you around Christmas time. In many cases, they are not performance based, but instead sort of democratically dispensed for non- qualitative/quantitative reasons.
AIG, I would bet, owes these bonuses, for the most part, to traders who performed well and have contracts which rewards them based upon how much money they made for AIG.
So, the guys who performed well might have been the company bears, or the hedgers. Perhaps their market/trading decisions saved or made AIG billions. And these would be the guys who truly deserve their compensation. Not to mention, the guys/women, who the company would want to keep for future performance.
But our President, who I very much think is overwhelmed at the moment, doesn’t have a clue on how markets work. He is just a guy who opens his mouth all the time and says what he thinks is the populace view and in this case, it’s those boogey-man executives (more sympathetic term than trader). His lack of business experience or any type of experience in finance or running a business is truly exposing him as our first amateur, American President.
Mar 17, 2009 - 7:51 pm 10. Andrew:The AIG-RAGE dog and pony show is at it’s core a blatant attempt to one up and overshadow the “Tea Party” issues and resulting protests.
Mar 17, 2009 - 7:57 pm 11. Minerva:Contrasting the “Rich AIG freeloaders” getting taxpayer funded bonuses with the poor misled and defrauded homeowner/victims has seemed to accomplish this goal. Effectively neutralizing the angry taxpayer.
Obama never practiced law. Always looking off stage to his lawyers. Never occurred to him to read and think about what he was signing off on.
Mar 17, 2009 - 9:25 pm 12. Gaffe Prices:Its Tue. Mar. 17 and in taking the measure of leftist punditry today, I come across Dana Milbanks “Obamas Outrage Gap” OpEd, to see that the left is looking over here, looking over there, irritatedly re-adjusting themselves in their chairs, and courageously taking to task the faux pas of 0′bzzz’es statements concerning the “nothing we can do about it”, [these] “bonus payments to AIG exec” (clowns) statement by our chief executive. As if it’s some mere breach of etiquette at some unbearable hear-a-pin-drop tea party.
Gee, what an understatement Dana
Mar 17, 2009 - 9:31 pm 13. Godzilla:Don’t hurt yourself…
Look, the guy thought there were 57 states. Verdict: utterly stupid, case closed.
Mar 17, 2009 - 9:38 pm 14. frank:Let’s not forget that it was October 24, 2008 when AIG had taken 90.3 billion dollars of taxpayer money. It was November 2008 when the US Treasury announced it was buying 40 billion in AIG stock.
Whine all you want about President Obama, but giving AIG over a hundred billion dollars with no strings attached is all on the President Bush. He’s the one who started leading our country into this bailout craziness and toward socialism.
Mar 17, 2009 - 10:03 pm 15. Gaffe Prices:And another thing, I’ve noticed something:
We were told, nay cautioned, of the unleashing of 0bamas ‘army of defenders’ on blogs, cell phone’s, public squares, message boards, cell phone’s, street corners with protest signs “Help Save Our Homes” professionally printed, and and cell phone’s, with that “in your face” urgency necessary to counter the dirty, mean spirited tactics of the opposition.
And I’ve seen them on blogs, with their lame, “flaming bag of doo doo on the doorstep” style pickle jabberer cowardice, involving hurling various scatalogical and other “bodily fuction” insinuendo at their ‘counterparts’, and then scurrying back to safer ground, lest they read a reply, in that defecating, barely literate slacker style that earns a hearty High Five from the other sage stoner volunteers manning the boards.
Oh, its tough, I know(!), what with the ol’ cap’n of the team, Jabberer the Tut, giving them so much to work with an’ all.
But hey, you know, expectations and all, well, they can eat your free lunch, that much we’ve knowed, since the past fifty days.
Mar 17, 2009 - 10:04 pm 16. Mike_K:I believe the left’s intention is to keep their voters running on righteous outrage and moral indignation. Strong emotions, but necessary to keep their base from calming down, and using logic and reason to evaluate the true situation.
There was a guy in Germany who developed this technique to an art. Fortunately, this is the USA where people still listen to Battle Hymn of the Republic and think about what it means. He won’t get away with it even by trying to dry up the supply of ammunition.
Mar 17, 2009 - 10:35 pm 17. Judith:Face it, Obama’s primary school education was in a Muslim school in Indonesia…doubtful he was reading the Federalist Papers or being reared on rag-to-riches stories of the open frontier or of proud American rugged individualism. Blame the messenger, the mainstream media. As long as the fawning MSM continues to prop up this pink panther of a President he will remain unexposed & smugly mediocre as he drags us all along in his inevitable defeat.
Mar 17, 2009 - 11:08 pm 18. Gaffe Prices:You gotta wonder, if that first creak in boards under his (Dodd’s) foot, is the bearer of a chill wind that means he, or Schumer, is going to feel the conspicuous pulling away of support of various democrat peers who desperately want to save their own skin by looting Dodd’s Special Elite Senate “Life Preserver” and who “just can’t away, its so busy around here” (to go on cable TV and defend him against “these charges…”)
Why it may get so bad, they all might just start treating him like a Republican.
And Schumer is even more pathetic, with his “if you don’t give back the money, we will tax you at a rate of 100%…” with that hall-monitor, neo-puritan, half-moon reading-glasses, derisive sneer.
And then I’m gonna pop the cork on some nice, vintage schadenfruede, and kick back and watch as, one by one, these delusional narcissist democrat party company men start turning on each other, and feeding each other to the sharks in a frenzy, in the vain hope that they’ll get eaten last.
And watch as the grandiose conceit slithers from their faces only to be replaced by terror and shock, as their eyes look like cue balls followed by the hysterical wailing and wailing, and hollering, and bellowing….
The hollering… the hollering… the hollering…
Mar 18, 2009 - 12:06 am 19. Gaffe Prices:down the hallowed halls of congress- “IT WAS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, HALLIBURTON, AHHHH!, AHHHHHHHH!!, WAHHHHHHHH!!!
REFORM!!! WAHHHHH!! WAH! WAH!
CHANGE!!! IT WAS THE OBAMAS ADMINISTRATION, THE WORST CABINET,
THE WORST, THE WORST CONGRESS,
THE WORST ADMINISTRATION, WAHHHHH!!!! SINCE THE GREAT DEPRESSION! AHHHH!!!!
Fasten your straitjackets, Senators Dodd and Schumer, you too Rep.s Artur Davis D-Ala, Barney Frank and Gregory Meeks D-NY, Lacy Clay D-MO, Maxine Waters D-Ca, come on now Jamie Gorelick and Franklin Raines CEO CFO Frannie Mac and Feddie Mae,
Its gonna be a bumpy ride, in the back of that luxury van
Mar 18, 2009 - 12:25 am 20. Larry J:Pay no attention to the more than $90 Billion that AIG has paid out to banks from the bailout money. No, you’re supposed to ignore that while being distracted by the $165 million paid out in bonuses that the legislation specifically authorized. This mostly phoney outrage is mostly a distraction from where the real money is going. And people are falling for it just like so many did for Obama. Sad.
Mar 18, 2009 - 6:51 am 21. Mike_K:I have heard that many of those bonuses went to non-US citizens and are out of reach. This is more faux outrage for TV cameras but it is costing them. The generic poll has the Dems down today. The election was only a couple of months ago but it seems these guys have been there forever.
Mar 18, 2009 - 6:51 am 22. david foster:“the more than $90 Billion that AIG has paid out to banks from the bailout money”…what did people think was going to happen to the bailout money? AIG was in the business of credit default swaps–basically, insurance on business loans. The whole purpose of bailing out AIG was to ensure that it could meet its obligations–well, these were its obligations.
There is a reasonable case that the conventional insurance component of AIG should have been saved, and the derivatives-writing component allowed to go into Chapter 11 (or worse)
Mar 18, 2009 - 7:03 am 23. Lightnin' Hopkins:As PC14 pointed out, the bonus kerfuffle is misunderstood by most people who believe that this compensation is the same as your standard Christmas bonus. It’s another useful diversionary smokescreen, just like the auto execs flying to D.C. in corprate jets – total hypocritical b.s. that obscures the larger shell game at hand.
It’s the same as the tired minimum wage “debate” we have every few years (what’s enough, how about $50 an hour? $100?), only squeezing from the other end on executive level compensation. Equal pay for equal misery, punishing success and thereby killing the productive drive of employees and entreprenaurs alike. Senators grandstanding, threatening to confiscate what is not legally theirs, all in the name of “social justice.”
Giving in to the populist fury of the ignorant – indeed, *joining* in it – is precisely what the statist (collectivist, socialist, whatever you like…) goons want. All the better to control you and expand their power. It’s positively Chavezesque.
Mar 18, 2009 - 7:58 am 24. AlanC:Chris Dodd explicitly put into the bill the loophole that protects the bonuses.
“The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.”
President Zero signed that bill.
Chris Dodd and Zero were the largest recipients of AIG contributions in 2008.
Their outrage is as faux as faux can be. The AIG folks are just the next wave of bus differential inspectors.
The thing that pissed me off this morning is when I saw the Zero had plenty of time to spend yesterday with ESPN picking his NCAA bracket.
When will we start hearing serious calls for torches and pitchforks?
Mar 18, 2009 - 8:07 am 25. Lightnin' Hopkins:Want something to be truly outraged about?:
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/03/18/are-we-disarming-pilots/
Mar 18, 2009 - 8:13 am 26. Gaffe Prices:#23:
What another poster on another thread shared was how survivors of the ol’ sove-yet cystum said “they pretended to pay us, and we pretended to work”
Sounds like they now think those old “wage debates” are OVER, just like AlGore, and those “what’s enough, 50 dollars and hour? 100?” questions are not nearly so far-fetched, so pie-in-the-sky after all, I mean, look at all the money we’ve already looted from these suckers, $850,000,000,000 billion here, 1.5 trillion the next time… hey, we’re all just thinkin too small time, let’s shoot the works!
This is better than money on trees! Look at it, its already here! And we don’t have to pick it off them trees til they’re bare!
Yah-hoooo!!!
Mar 18, 2009 - 4:23 pm 27. cfbleachers:“Beware the Barabberwock, my son!
The finger flips, the religion clings!
Beware the BideBide bird, and shun
The welshist Shekelsting!”
He took his sophies sword in hand:
Long time the middie foe he sought –
So rested he by the dulcet tree,
Did teleport awhile in thought.
And, as in hopcha thought he stood,
The Barabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came spattle through the dedings wood,
And orwast as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The sophies blade went wallbanger-bling!
He left it dead, and with its head
He put it on a spring.
“And, who was slain by Barabberwock?
Called to arms, my leg-tingle boy!
O Social day! Commue! Commay!’
They chortled in their joy.
`Twas ACORL, and the slithy corfs
Mar 18, 2009 - 6:20 pm 28. Gaffe Prices:Did spind and weffle in the dask:
All fleemy were the boromorfs,
And the pfleg wraite outermask.
WOW! cfbleachers! I sure wish I could do that! Its all I can do to hack some typos together into some legible prose. But hey, monkey see monkey do, right? I’ll get there..someday oops! i did it again; that was so racist.
Mar 18, 2009 - 7:59 pm 29. zefal:Neobuzz:
That’s why they are going to stuff as much socialsimm down our throat before the gag mechanism kicks in. And I doubt the republicans will ever have large enough majorities in both houses and have the White House to overturn it.
No sunset clauses in legislation that dems pass only legislation that Republicans pass.
Mar 18, 2009 - 11:52 pm 30. Bolie Williams IV:According to Libby’s testimony before Congress, the bonuses were not performance bonuses but retention bonuses. They were offered to employees to get them to stay at AIG to help wind up the business as safely as possible. Given that these people were in the process of eliminating their own jobs, a bonus was offered as an incentive for them to stay until the job was done instead of leaving immediately. They stayed and got the job done and deserve the money. And these were not the ones who “destroyed the company”… they are others.
A true leader would actually explain this to the people and then explain why it was a waste of time to worry about it… but he’s not a true leader and would probably rather people be outraged at the “bonus” issue rather than the fact that the billions paid to AIG went to other companies even though that’s probably not a bad thing, either, for the economy.
Mar 19, 2009 - 3:55 pm 31. Gaffe Prices:Ombusman: We’ve done some re-writes and re-shot the scene with more echo, and some cowbell, and interspersed it with this contrasing scene of eerie calm, with Nancy, who hasn’t been charged with anything yet, in a corner with this creepy, glassy eyed stare, softly babbling and repeating, “(It was), for the chil-dren, for the chil-dren, for the chil-dren, for the chil-dren…
Mar 19, 2009 - 8:12 pm