Bailouts and Bonuses

The spectacle continues, failed executives reaping not what they have sown, but the benefits of bailouts and stimulus in form of bonuses from our taxes. President Obama tells Sec. Treas. Tim Geithner to get it back and the congressional financial services committee chair, the usually frank Barney, expresses outrage and threatens action. It’s a bit rich—the pun obviously intended—to expect anybody, just looking for a job, to be anything but outraged.

Maureen Dowd invokes the words of her father who cautioned against barricading a door with a boiled carrot. We’ve had a bit too many soggy vegetables and not enough real roughage in the Washington diet of late. AIG replaces the bankers and automobile geniuses as poster child of the week in the ongoing tales of “don’t these guys get it?” After a dressing down from the commander in chief, AIG chairman Liddy now says the AIG bonus babies are going to give half back; bravo! As one teacher I know once said, while explaining the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction, “you can’t make this stuff up”.

So send in the clowns. The only place to go these days for a dose of sanity is your favorite comedian. Whether it’s Stewart or Leno, O’Brien or Letterman, Maher or Colbert, they seem to be the only sane ones around. And they make us laugh. So when President Obama sits down with Jay Leno this week, maybe we can get past the cooked carrots and find out if there is something a bit more solid on the menu when it comes to calling out the malefactors who are raiding the treasury. Maybe some of those millions might find their way to job seekers and businesses that really need it.