The Criminal Element

Via Matt Yglesias, I bring you the Chairman of the Republican National Committee:

We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I use my fingers as quotation marks, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? Not very long.

The conservative answer to the famous “How Long? Not Long!” speech is a few decades late.

In any case, it’s encouraging to know that the putative leader of the Republican Party is taking his climate science cues from such classic films as D2: The Mighty Ducks:

[Bombay is eating ice cream with the Iceland trainer]
Coach Bombay: I thought Iceland was covered with ice.
María: No, it’s very green!
Coach Bombay: I thought GREENLAND was green!
María: Greenland is covered with ice, and Iceland is very nice!

President Obama, apparently as disgusted as the rest of us:

“In the last six months, A.I.G. has received substantial sums from the U.S. Treasury,” Mr. Obama said. He added that he had asked Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner “to use that leverage and pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.”

In strongly-worded remarks delivered in the White House East Room before small business owners, Mr. Obama called A.I.G. “a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed.”

“Under these circumstances, it’s hard to understand how derivative traders at A.I.G. warranted any bonuses at all, much less $165 million in extra pay,” Mr. Obama said. “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?”

White House officials said that the administration is not looking to take A.I.G. to court to stop the company from paying out the bonuses. But they said the Treasury Department would be trying to figure out what they can do to block A.I.G. from making the payments within the legal confines of A.I.G.’s contractual obligations to the executives.

“All across the country, there are people who work hard and meet their responsibilities every day, without the benefit of government bailouts or multimillion-dollar bonuses,” said Mr. Obama, who called the issue one of “fundamental values.”

“All they ask is that everyone, from Main Street to Wall Street to Washington, play by the same rules,” he said.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, picking up Eliot Spitzer’s old niche as populist crusader against Wall Street largesse, has threatened to serve AIG with subpoenas if the company doesn’t send over a “list of employees who will receive these bonuses, as well as their job information and performances” by the end of the day.

As outrageous as these repeated bailouts have been, it’s nice to see rhetoric like Obama’s flowing from the East Room of the White House. To Go John Galt Karl Marx for a moment, crises like the debt derivative catastrophe we find ourselves in now “highten the contradictions” – they lay bare the competing interests of disparate social cliques, call into clear relief the prevailing socioeconomic structure of the society at large, and show us whose side everyone is really on. All of these things fuel a popular rage that compels us to question the fundamental legitimacy of the current order. For the last 30 years we could rely on the federal government – and the occupants of the Oval Office especially – to pretend to be above that fray, even as they quietly took the money and did the bidding of the people we now refer to as the Masters of the Universe. Obama’s remarks – “all they ask is that everyone play by the same rules” – at least indicates a recognition among mainstream politicians that, down here, we’re starting to wonder if “Change” is really all the change we need.

In case you didn’t see this coming from a mile away, our friends at the American International Group, recipient of $170 billion in federal bailout money, will be dispensing $165 million in cash bonuses to the top dogs of the company’s financial products division. Let me make that clear. We have all learned that AIG is actually two companies – one very profitable and very well-managed consumer insurance agency, and one godless financial speculation outfit run by coke-addled lunatics. We’re not talking about the former here. The coke-addled lunatics are getting $165 million in bonuses because, as the acting chairman of AIG’s board explained to a reportedly extremely pissed off Timothy Geithner, the company is contractually obligated to dispense them. [cough.] Sorry.

Two things. First, what the hell kind of contract guarantees bonuses of the size these people are bound to get when they’re hundreds of billions of dollars in the red and the federal government holds an 80 percent stake in the company? Second, I’m no lawyer, I don’t see what’s stopping Congress and the administration (as a legal matter, anyway) from doing what one of Matt Yglesias’s commenters suggests and retroactively legislating the relevant clauses of those contracts out of existence. It would only (!) save $165 million, but damn, it would feel really, really good.

UPDATE: Did I say $165 million? Because it seems I actually meant $450 million.

The Washington Post would prefer to forget the years between January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009, but that damn Barack Obama just won’t let it go:

Obama’s more frequent and acid reminders that former president George W. Bush left behind a trillion-dollar budget deficit, a 14-month recession and a broken financial system have come at the same time Republicans have ramped up criticism that the current president’s policies are compounding the nation’s economic problems.

Obama had initially been content to leave partisan defense strategy to his proxies, but as the fiscal picture has continued to darken, he has appeared more willing to risk his image as a politician who is above petty partisanship to personally remind the public of Bush’s legacy.

You owe it to yourself to read Scott Wilson’s exercise in selective obliviousness yourself, because the entire piece is eminently snarkable blockquotable. The national news media is a narrative-seeking creature; I understand that. The trouble here is that the narrative we’re supposed to accept bears virtually no connection to reality, and not only that, it bears virtually no connection to the reality that this front page article actually mentions in passing.

The president did not receive a single House Republican vote for his stimulus plan, prompting some in his administration to view his bipartisan outreach efforts as having little hope of success.

It’s schizophrenic. The facts that Wilson establishes within the confines of this piece are these:  Obama makes inaugural pledge to “end recriminations” and reach out to Republicans, the congressional Republican caucus ignores his overtures and delivers exactly three votes to the administration’s stimulus plan (despite the fact, according to Arlen Specter, that a significantly higher number secretly want it to pass), proceed to step up their criticism of his economic program, and Obama responds by reminding people that the Bush gang spent eight years digging the hole we now find ourselves in. And the narrative Wilson is trying to build on these facts?  Obama is poisoning the air with partisanship. Bizarre. Who can be fooled by this?

Only Village journalists can be this credulous, because only Village journalists – always determined to remain in awe of the vaunted “toughness” and “discipline” of the Republican machine, even when that machine is flailing from leader to leader and its towering intellectual giant is toying with the idea of paying teen girls not to get pregnant – can buy the notion that Bipartisan is only Bipartisan when the Democrats chip away at their own agenda until the Republicans get their way, and that Tough-and-Principled is only Tough-and-Principled when a barely-relevant Republican minority cynically obstructs a popular Democratic president.

And the disastrous part is that this narrative – Republicans as Steadfast Manly Men – has become self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating. Based on this Wilson’s article, you would never know that the Senate Democratic caucus is two (soon to be one) vote short of a cloture-sealing majority, that congressional Republicans have a 71 percent “unfavorable” rating, and that the entire conservative movement is crumbling before our eyes. Instead, the pressure is applied to the Notoriously Inept and Disorganized Democrats – who, it must be said, sabotage themselves by cowering beneath headlines like this – until they cave, the narrative is illustrated for all to see, and the process starts all over again. It’s what Matt Taibbi calls the “reality-making business” – it bears no relationship to actual reality.