At least Gail Collins gets it:
Liddy, a retired insurance executive who took over A.I.G. six months ago at the behest of the Treasury Department, said he had asked most of those who got a bonus to give at least half back. This did not seem to calm the subcommittee members down very much, although the fact that Liddy is working without pay while getting mail from people who want to garrote him with piano wire seemed to have a slight dampening effect.
It is not particularly satisfying to complain about businessmen who answer their country’s call for $1 a year. However, Liddy does have three houses, which is one above the new quota.
Let’s complain about Barack Obama. Why doesn’t he sound angrier? Doesn’t he understand that his job right now is to be the Great Venter?
Sure he keeps saying he’s mad. But you can tell that he secretly thinks it’s crazy to obsess about $165 million in bonuses in a company that’s still got $1.6 trillion in toxic assets to unravel. “I don’t want to quell that anger. I want to channel our anger in a constructive way,” he said on Wednesday. Everybody knows constructively channeled anger doesn’t really count. It’s like diet pizza.
Collins can’t always pull-off effective snark, but this column gets the job done. Congress and the political media are engaged in a phony contest to prove who is the most outraged. It’s all manipulative bullshit. We have plenty of reason to be angry. But getting angry about $165 million in retention bonuses is like mourning the loss of your couch when your entire house has burned down. Beating up on Sen. Dodd, Sec. Geithner, and Barack Obama over this is just doing the bidding of Republicans and making you look like a dupe.
My advice is to do something to change the subject. Hasn’t a white women gone missing somewhere? Paging Gary Condit. Was that a shark attack I just saw?
