Are you outraged by these AIG bonuses?
No, no. For Pete’s sake, you’re an A-list congressional bigshot. Try to get a bit of feeling into “outraged.” The president’s teleprompter puts it in italics, bold, capitalized, and underlined: OUTRAGED!
That’s better. Don’t forget to furrow your brow and fume. No, not like a camp waiter when you send back the arugula salad drizzled in an aubergine coulis. We’re looking for primal, righteous anger: 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, like all busy senators and congressmen, you don’t have time to read every footling trillion-dollar bill before you vote in favor of it. And yes, true, the specific passage addressing these particular bonuses was, in fact, added to the bill in your name, but that was nothing to do with you — you just did that because the White House asked you to, and just because their people called your people and some intern in your office drafted some boilerplate with your name on it is no reason for you to be denied ten minutes of grandstanding on MSNBC. It’s an outrage to suggest you’re anything other than outrageously outraged!
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 the other day, 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! Why, it was almost as funny as his gag on
The Tonight Show. 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 and kicks loose a little. Maybe next time he can toss in that the Dow Jones has got “Down” syndrome — geddit? Oh, come on! Don’t be so uptight and politically correct!!! And besides, anyone who says the president shouldn’t be doing crip jokes is a racist.
Frank James of the
Chicago Tribune criticized the president’s bon mot more in sorrow than in anger: “Obama seems to be a fairly sensitive and compassionate man who wouldn’t purposely set out to offend the disabled . . . ”
Are you sure about that? He might be “a fairly sensitive and compassionate man.” Alternatively, he could be a mean, self-absorbed s.o.b. who regards anyone other than himself as intellectually disabled. The truth is we don’t know, because in the course of the presidential campaign the press declined to do even the most elementary due diligence on him. And, like Congress with the stimulus, the electorate didn’t bother to find out what’s in there before they voted for it.
Still, on the basis of its first 60 days, this is a very odd presidency. In between appearances on Jay Leno and his “March Madness” picks, Barack Oprompta also found time to compare AIG executives to suicide bombers:
Even though it makes you angry because you’re thinking I was responsible, and these folks are irresponsible, and somehow I’m paying for them, it was the right thing to do to step in. The same is true with AIG. It was the right thing to do to step in. Here is the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got, they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up, but you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.
Right. It’s like you’re at the Jay Leno post-show party and suddenly you notice this AIG vice-president has wandered in, with six figures of bonus strapped to his waist and he’s yelling “Allahu Akbar!” — which is Arabic for “I’d like to deposit this in my Cayman Islands account.”
Maybe Obama’s teleprompter had a wild night on the tiles, and inserted his terrorism speech into the middle of his bonus outrage. But, if not, we now know why the White House announced that they’ll no longer be using the term “enemy combatants” for the Gitmo crowd. They’re reserving that designation for AIG execs, most of whom will shortly be extraordinary-renditioned to Saudi Arabia where a touch of the old electric cattle-prods should soon have their bowling scores heading south.
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