AIG: Obama, the Good Humor Man

You’re outraged, OUTRAGED that bonuses are being handed out at companies the American taxpayer is bailing out. Yes, to be sure, the bonuses were specifically provided for in the legislation, but..you don’t have time to read every footling trillion-dollar bill …And yes, true, the specific passage addressing these particular bonuses was…added to the bill in your name, but that was nothing to do with you...To his credit, the Hopeychanger-in-Chief has had some difficulty doing the outrage kabuki with a straight face. In the middle of his press conference…he got a tickle in his throat and departed from his telepromptered script to joke: “Excuse me, I’m choked up with anger here.” How the assembled hacks laughed!…almost as funny as,…referring to his 129 score at the White House bowling alley, the president cracked that “it was like the Special Olympics.” Ha-ha! What a card that Obama is when he unplugs the prompter…Maybe next time he can toss in that the Dow Jones has got “Down” syndrome — geddit? …And besides, anyone who says the president shouldn’t be doing crip jokes is a racist….The Outrage Kabuki, Mark Steyn, National Review, 3/23/2009

Is this why Sixty Minutes asked the President if he was punch drunk this past Sunday? Who wouldn’t be? Hope and Change, as many already knew, were nice words to replay forty thousand times in the campaign, but now seem to have a present trading value approximately equal to, and as real as, a 3-dollar bill.

Hope: That this worldwide economic disaster, largely generated by wildly irresponsible national politicians and international banks and brokerages (representatives from which have come the economic advisers to the Obama Administration) won’t blow up in a re-run of the Depression.

Change: Different face in the White House; different group of advisers, most of them from disintegrating money center banks, busted brokerages and the Clinton Administration; a dramatically devalued dollar; hugely lowered expectations for most; a triumph over America by Obama supporter George Soros and his allies; denials that terrorists are anything but gangsters subject to the rational proceedings of the judiciary; different rhetoric; much better delivery of same; bankrupting the taxpayers and the future of their children to bail out institutions a free market would have hung out to dry years ago.

Any sentient being dumb enough to fall for this AIG huffin’ an’ a-puffin’ from Barry, Barney, Doddy, and the gang is a fool who deserves the vaporization of his assets that the national political class is lining up for him. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, the $165 million in bonuses is less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion budget. The massive expansion of government the president is planning is forever, and will ensure that you end your days in what Peggy Noonan calls “post-prosperity America.” More immediately, what message do you send to the world when legal contracts can be abrogated by retrospective confiscatory bills of attainder? You think that’s going to get anyone investing in America again?…(Kabuki…Mark Steyn, cont’d)

The President’s behavior, as noted by Steyn, is more like the Teflon Don’s amusement at his prosecutors than that of a Chief Executive. And it won’t be long before the Obama Youth are out on the streets confronting taxpayers about the need for another couple of trillion in deficit spending. As Argentina has demonstrated over the last twenty-five years, once the lying starts, once the mob in the streets is listened to by the national legislature and the national executive, it always ends in bankruptcy, often in war, and always in national humiliation. When this fool and his supporters come ringing their bells on your street, keep your door closed. Watch out for your children. The only flavor these good humor men have to offer is a poisoned future.

Luther

AIG, and the People's Response

Singer Lloyd Marcus told the crowd assembled in Lake Eola Park on Saturday that he was going to give them his take on the first days of the Obama administration. Then he shrieked. That pretty much summed up the mood in the park Saturday afternoon, when more than 4,000 people attended the Orlando Tea Party, a conservative rally aimed at expressing discontent with Washington. "This is maybe the greatest single gathering of God-fearing patriots in the history of Orlando, Florida," local conservative radio host Bud Hedinger, who emceed the event, told the crowd. The attendees, many of whom said they'd heard about the rally on Hedinger's radio show, brandished flags and homemade signs bearing slogans such as "Repeal the pork or our bacon is cooked" and "Obama lied, liberty died."…Orlando Tea Party Draws More than 4000, Helen Eckinger, 3/23/2009

Meanwhile, back in the middle class that Vice President Biden said the Democrats were going to save, there are some cranky individuals out there, you know, those deemed worthless by the Obama Administration, those who go to work, pay their taxes, pay their mortgages, manage their household budgets, and try to plan for a retirement that looks like it might be very far off. These tea parties are marvelous events; and they’ve been happening nationwide. The people can differentiate between democratic leaders and a new George the Third.

Sadly, their events remind this writer a great deal of the farmers’ rallies in the Carter Administration in the 1970s, when family farmers drove their tractors to Washington to express their shock and outrage at the bias in federal farm policy toward subsidizing corporate farms, highly conglomerated competitors who could cut prices until they shut down any survivors, even as they salted out the land they managed. Fact is, those policies did just what those protesters claimed. The family farm, by and large, is now a hobbyist’s vocation. Big Agriculture, rather like big agriculture under Lenin and Stalin in the old USSR, simply wiped out the competition.

But this writer is going to continue to beat his drum, hoping that Joe Biden’s targets of salvation keep raising holy hell to stop the manic hypocrisy and lying in Washington, DC. Because, the only real bankruptcy that will be a tragedy in the next few years will be when people who really are responsible are left in the impoverished shadows of bailed out dinosaurs like AIG and Citibank.

If you wanted to have an example of how the government’s operation of the economy works, you couldn’t ask for a better one than the government’s handling of AIG. It works to the advantage of those who are most like the government: bloated; overbearing; tyrannical; greedy; grasping; arbitrary – a highly organized class of thieves.

Luther