And yes, that says “bad hand,” not “bad head,” “bad cold,” “bad hearing,” or “early onset dementia”. From the Campaign Spot:
President Obama may have set a new record for disingenuousness moments ago, when he asked where those who are objecting to AIG bonuses were several years ago when Wall Street was handing out larger bonuses, and claiming that they believed, not long ago, that the government should never get involved in the market.
First, there were lots of folks who believed that when a company pays its top executives a massive amount of money, disproportionate or contradicting those executives’ performance, then the shareholders should revolt.
Second, the fact that AIG has taken massive amounts of taxpayer dollars would appear to make this a different circumstance than your garden-variety massive bonus. If a company compensates lousy employees with millions, at least it’s their money. In this case, it’s our money.
Obama continues, saying the answer is to put “smart regulations in place.” Smart regulations require smart regulators; a big question in this crisis was whether anyone at Treasury was “minding the store,” so to speak. At this point, it appears no one in government bothered to object to the bonuses until it was too late. The president’s argument amounts to calling for additional power in the hands of those who dropped the ball on this matter.
Fair enough.
But, let’s be honest: that is a rather charitable reading of events. The bonuses were no secret, after all — and it is hardly inspiring of confidence to note that it was perhaps incompetence rather than his administration and party’s own perfidy at which the President pretended to rail yesterday.
Too, when Republicans were calling for regulations of the kind that might have prevented the failure of Fannie and Freddy Mac, they were attacked by folks like Barney Frank — who is now saying he’ll fix the problems by way of the types of regulations he once denounced as unnecessary and that others denounced as “racist.”
How anyone can take these people at their word — or cut them even an inch of slack — is beyond me.
— That is, until I remember that a professional campaigner with no practical leadership experience and a lifetime of ties to radicals and Marxist dogma made it into the White House by way of styrofoam pillars and a bumpersticker message filled with promises he had no intention of ever keeping.
Post partisan? Yeah, tell that to Rush Limbaugh. Post racial? Turns out you can’t be a black and conservative without having been colonized by racists.
A majority of Americans bought into a fraud. Many are now realizing it. And what’s ironic is, after all the fuss over “I hope he fails,” it might just happen that the vast majority of the voting public is thinking precisely the same thing as they watch their savings disappear along with their jobs, even as they’re told by Mr Geithner that they need to sacrifice cheap energy and the growth of job-producing industry for the good of a planet whose soils, for Californians at least, they might be regulated right out of growing their own food in.
****
related: from Michelle Malkin.
Incidentally, this piece dovetails nicely with my responses to Patterico’s hypothetical, which he claims I’m too scared to address.
(h/t cj burch)
****
update the second: Tom Maguire, on additional consequences of dishonest and frantic populist posturing.
Perhaps someone in Obama’s administration will take a stiff belt and muster up the nerve to remind Obama that he’s no longer campaigning — and that people really do expect him to at least try to lead.
I know, filthy proles, the lot of them, making demands on you. But sometimes you have to make concessions, Big Guy.
Jeff, I would have thought you would have had a greater appreciation for this, the Funniest End of Civilization Ever.
I mean, not 5 minutes ago I saw someone (a conservative I [presume) say that President Joe Biden (were Obama to resign) wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
Try to wrap your head around that.
Any time someone says “smart regulation” is the answer, I point out that that Markopolous dude wrote a letter to the SEC in 2005, spelling out word for word why Bernie Madoff was a fraud, and still nothing happened until Mdoff confessed.
That’s the caliber of our regulators.
OK, so he’s tossing off a card playing reference.
The better question to ask is why we care more than slightly about these decimal dust bonuses.
What purpose does this distraction serve, and why are we being led about by the nose with this fauxtrage?
Was there ever self-congratulatory bloody-minded self-righteous indignation of the sort we see on nearly every hand today against AIG that was not bound up in a lie, however cleverly hidden that lie might be? I wonder.
“It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.”
— Karl Popper
No big deal. If this is the dance we have to do to get the money we’ll do it. It’s like being a stripper, the pole we dance on is just more slippery.
Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick earned in salary and bonuses $90 million and $75 million respectively while at Fannie Mae. At the same time Fannie was forced to restate earnings to the tune of roughly $5 billion and pay fines circa 2005.
Two people, $165 million.
Anybody recall the theater of outrage? Me neither.
Those pillars were styrofoam?
But, you know, they LOOKED presidential, and that’s all that matters.
A majority of Americans bought into a fraud. Many are now realizing it
You know Baracky and his teleprompter are worried about this. That’s why he’s going on Leno. That’s why he’s having those brownshirt meetings this weekend. Which I’m attending.
“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em – and burrow from within.”
Saul A., I think.
P.S. – he needs a “mojo hand”
(grin)
I answered that question yesterday, Chris.
My mother, for instance, voted for Obama and it was his pretend outrage over this, even when he had to have known about these contracts, and even as he received a large donation from AIG, that finally opened her eyes to what a lying crapweasel she pulled the lever for so that “she could see a black man become President in her time.”
As if the color of the skin and not the content of the character was what mattered.
Regardless of what Ric Caric says, Dr King is spinning in his grave — and as I predicted, this President will set back racial progress many years, especially when it turns out he has an in with a JournoList goon squad who targets private citizens and orchestrates media attacks of the kind offered by Dyson, wherein white conservatives are using “racist code words” and black conservatives are uncle toms.
This is a vintage argument, but one that had lost its luster until this new post-racial Presidency.
Kenny Rogers would have known just how to play this hand.
Tom Maguire, quoting the WaPo and then commenting himself, points to another reason as well**:
related: from Michelle Malkin.
Uh, is there a missing link?
Geithner Making ‘All the Right Moves’ With a Bad Handâ€
I just shit my pants. Flashbacks, you know.
Unless he’s all-in in the big blind and can’t cover the ante, the right move is to fold that bad hand.
Link fixed
From Michelle’s linked WH press brief yesterday, we get this on judicial nominations:
Uh huh. I’m sure the hedgies are just lining up to jump in bed with this congress now that they’re proposing to tax “carried interest.” But speaking of hedge funds, try to wrap your head around this from a mathmetician who works on Wall Street:
In what I nominate as the meta moment of the, admittedly short, tenure of the new administration, this guy is explaining that TARP and TALF and all the other bailout acronyms are turning the government into…wait for it…one galactically enormous hedge fund that probably 95% of all Americans would be prohibited from investing by law in had the been offered the chance.
“…having the ability to empathize and walk in someone’s shoes provides valuable perspective for somebody making important decisions from the bench.”
Why do I get the feeling that the shoes in question aren’t the ones that the writers of the Constitution were wearing at the time?
Not original but….
The only thing Obama has ever run is his mouth.
“smart regulationâ€
From the same people who brought you the Washington, DC school district, the Postal Service and the IRS.
Those shoes are kept in a museum, where you can look but not touch, certainly not wear.
“I cried because I had no shoes, until I saw a man with no feet, so I took his shoes.”
-Dave Barry
“Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you criticize him, you’re a mile away and you have his shoes.”
Did anybody hear the clip of Barney Frank demanding he be given a non-confidential list of the AIG execs and bonuses so he can demagogue them? Even though they have been getting death threats, and many innocent people would likely have their lives ruined, Frank and his buddies would grant fucking terrorists more rights.
These bastards truly are evil. It needs to be said as loudly and as often as possible.
I wonder how long it will take ’til Obama proposes moving the White House to Disneyworld? It’s gotta be coming along here sooner or later.
So Obama signs the stimulus bill as his greatest victory in his young presidency, not knowing that he was signing into law, the legal protection of employment contracts – including bonuses.
Then the teleprompter is outraged about the bonuses so it channels that rage through Obama.
The end result: Obama looks like the moron he is. Sublime.
No need to move the White House to Disneyland SDferr. It is already in NeverNever Land. And then there is Barney Frank. What can you say about Barney Frank? Has a more vile, disgusting soul ever walked the face of the earth? Have the people of Massachusetts no shame? I suppose I probably shouldn’t ask silly questions.
Probably many worse. For instance, I have never thought very highly of his sister Ann since the first time I saw her dissimulating on Firing Line.
Bwahahaha! Dodd just threw Barky under the bus.
I love it when they turn cannibalistic.
Yeah and treasury forced chrissy to accept that sweetheart mortgage deal.
Seriously. I fucking hate Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. That’s how strong my feelings are. World’s biggest hypocrites and they know they can get away with it because nobody reports it. In contrast, I don’t hate Teleprompter Jesus though I strongly dislike him.
I’d guess that Dodd is worried about being the guest of honor on the next edition of Two Minutes’ Hate.
That’s the problem with the “inflame the mob” strategy, Barky. You have to worry about the mob showing up on your own doorstep.
I think this retard simply doesn’t have any plays in his book other than drumming up hatred against The Man.
Unfortunately, for him, he’s now The Man.
Unfortunately, for me, my comma placement in that last sentence makes no friggin’ sense whatsoever.
I don’t hate Teleprompter Jesus
Like in any arranged marriage, Matt, you will learn to hate him.
They are going to start eating their own pretty soon. I will not complain.
I will hate enough for both of us Matt.
u know who had a bad hand…
gene wilder in blazing saddles
cartoon people [usually 4 fingers]
peter sellers in dr stranglove
and me…everytime i see christiane amaphours face
i can’t click her off fast enuff
What, you are saying these aren’t “good men”?
How unpragmatic of you.
“…and that people really do expect him to at least try to lead.”
I have served under some excellent leaders (ie. GEN Petraeus, and my second company commander won the MacArthur Award – he is now a Brigadier) and some not so excellent (ie. GEN Clark, my third company commander – his nickname was “Captain Queeg”). I’ve also had to do some leading m’self.
It is hard. It is tiring. It often means placing others interests and comforts above your own. I haven’t seen much of this from the President yet…. while driving in to work and listening to the radio, I heard an ABC News story where the President supposedly said “The Buck Stops Here” – per the radio talker. What he did say was, basically, ‘it’s not my fault, I inherited all these problems.’
Not very Truman-like.
Just in: Teleprompter Jesus “takes responsibility”.
Sort of.
[…] he’s got full confidence in Geithner, and that he’s done everything right in playing the crap hand he’s been dealt. But it appears that Geithner was also the dealer in this particular, slipping himself crap cards […]
Knowing that Obama was at the forefront of frothing up outrage over the AIG bonuses, and now knowing that His Administration guaranteed the payment of those bonuses with an amendment to the Porkulus, via The Only Man Who Can Do The Job and the traumatized-into-repressing-memories Chris Dodd, this statement that begins at the 31 second mark is a thing of wonder.
Honestly, if I worked for AIG right now in Financial Products, I’d take whatever money I did have and bail. Set up a boiler-room in some mid-western city with a low cost of living and bet against AIGs book and take the motherfucker down.
It’s not like these guys were above it or anything, they’ve been pulling shit for years.
And to be honest, if my pay had been cut for four years running, I’d be gone already, and AIG would be going belly…
Saaaaaay….
I’m waiting for Obama to call the attempts to rein in Fannie and Freddie another failed policy of the Bush administration.