Anger Management

Barack Obama is mad. Larry Summers is mad. Chuck Grassley says they should resign or commit suicide. Stephen Colbert wants to lead a pitchfork-wielding mob after them. Rick Moran wants to put them in the stocks, and maybe have people throw tomatoes at them.

I'm pretty mad. And you probably are, too.

The utter tone-deafness of corporate leaders continues to astonish me. Auto executives fly to Washington in private jets to beg for a bailout. Citigroup takes the bailout bucks and orders a $50 million corporate jet. AIG, essentially insolvent because of its reckless risk-taking, vacuums up a staggering amount of taxpayer dollars and then pays out $165 million in bonuses.

Summers went on television Sunday and said there was nothing Treasury could do. Boy, that didn't last long. By Monday, the president was all but vowing to pry the bonus money from their cold, dead hands.

Are the media getting a little carried away with the AIG bonus coverage? Sure, the money is a tiny fraction of the federal bailout funds being sucked up by this insurance company and the big banks and Wall Street institutions. But symbolism matters in politics, and there's genuine public outrage at rewarding the irresponsible executives and traders who played a major role in causing this crash. (Not to mention resentment at financial journalists, as Jon Stewart demonstrated last week.)

At whom, after all, are we to focus our blame: at Bear, at Merrill, at Lehman, at Citi? These tend to be faceless institutions. That's why Bernie Madoff made such a great villain: a greedhead who lived in a penthouse apartment and perpetrated his scam on the rich and famous, as well as pension funds and ordinary investors. But he's gone off to jail now, hopefully for 150 years, so AIG's bonus bozos came along at just the right time.

When 11 company execs quit yesterday, CNN's Breaking News banner said: "AIG? ARGGHHH!"

Has Obama's failure to block the bonuses "dealt a sharp blow to his young administration," as the WP says? Or is the NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin right when he says: "If you think this economy is a mess now, imagine what it would look like if the business community started to worry that the government would start abrogating contracts left and right"?

One thing's for sure, as the NYT reports: "There was angry finger-pointing across Washington on Tuesday, as Congress, the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve all sought to avoid blame."

Which is Washington's main industry.

"Republicans also joined in lashing out at A.I.G. and sought to cast blame on Democrats, both in Congress and in the Obama administration."

The New York Post uses a curse word for its banner headline, and goes with this dispassionate lead: