March 18, 2009
Seriously, folks…it’s way past time we throw the tea in the harbor…or better yet, drop a bomb on anything that moves in Washington. The American people are being bent over like Barney Frank at a Fire Island biker party, and there is no end in sight as the finger-pointing has just begun.
Amid the hue and cry about AIG executive bonuses, the loudest voices are those of our beloved, two-faced Congressmen screeching their indignation about payouts they engineered and wondering why there was no “oversight” to the billions and billions being taken from the taxpayers’ pockets. They conveniently leave out the part about how they ramrodded 1000-page legislations into law, literally overnight, and against the will of the people, without bothering to read them. “Something has to be done now,” they intoned. Now they profess ignorance of the bills’ pesky little fine points that allow AIG’s “best and brightest” to receive bonuses so obscene that the notion of a mere $100,000 salary is considered destitution.
“This is another outrageous example of executives-including those whose decisions were responsible for the problems that caused AIG’s collapse-enriching themselves at the expense of the taxpayers,” cried Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, all three of his chins quivering in mock outrage. Dodd didn’t mention that during last year’s campaign cycle he was the largest recipient of AIG campaign contributions. He also failed to discuss his massive role in the current economic meltdown as he blocked legislation for oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and received sweetheart loans from Countrywide, one of the largest villains in the mortgage crisis. Like father, like son. Dodd’s old man was a crook, too. Thomas Dodd was censured by the Senate in 1967 for using campaign money for personal purposes, and, mercifully for the good people of Connecticut, died of a heart attack in 1970 before he could put his sticky fingers into the till again.
John McCain was on the Hannity show last night expressing his outrage-as much as that Cigar Store Indian automaton can express outrage-at the malfeasance being committed by his brethren and cronies against the “American people.” Always the “American people.” McCain was the one who, in a grand choreographed flourish, interrupted his presidential campaign last September to “return to Washington” so he could spearhead the first government bailout. To think that McCain was the next best choice to the Messiah last November is not only stunning, but downright terrifying.
Now, it turns out, tax cheat and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, knew about the AIG bonuses, but did nothing to stop them even as taxpayer money was being back-hoed into AIG coffers. Geithner is now in the unenviable position of having to admit ignorance, or admit culpability. Either way, he’s thoroughly incompetent, but that’s hardly cause for concern in Washington where ignorance, inculpability, and incompetence are the order of the day. “We’re doing more in weeks than other countries do in years,” Geithner proclaimed last week while trying to sell the ever-continuing three-card Monte the government is playing on the taxpayers. Geithner is as oily as they get, and he looks every bit the entitled, smug, little Ivy League liar that he is.
But they say you get what you deserve, and in the case of the American people, this is eminently true. Americans, as a whole, are painfully stupid about most things, but especially politics. All those exit polls where Betty Sue and Billy Joe are interviewed after voting are great fodder for Jay Leno and Jon Stewart (America’s main source for “news”), but also offer a glimpse at the swirling eddy we are now beyond escaping. Americans, the media tells us, are angry, but they continue to re-elect incumbents at well over a 90% clip. Most, I’m sure, are unaware that you can vote for someone besides the cynical and scheming mountebanks from the two major parties. Alas, the brainless among us can hardly be convinced to pull a third-party lever when they’re pre-occupied texting their votes into American Idol. “The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them,” Patrick Henry once said during the American Revolution. Indeed.