He’s Outraged!

Outraged, I say!

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama declared Monday that insurance giant American International Group is in financial straits because of “recklessness and greed” and said he intends to stop it from paying out millions in executive bonuses.

“It’s hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay,” Obama said at the outset of an appearance to announce help for small businesses hurt by the deep recession.

“How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat,” the president said.

Rush Limbaugh has started referring to anything Obama says as what Obama’s Teleprompter said.  As in, “President Barack Obama’s Teleprompter declared Monday that…”, and it’s pretty damned funny.  And it’s funny cuz it’s TRUE!  The president is basically a dumb output device, a bullhorn with hot pectorals, that amplifies whatever the Teleprompter tells him to say.  What we don’t know is where the Teleprompter gets its ideas from.  Who vetted the Teleprompter?  Where did it go to college?  Has it paid its taxes?  America wants to know!

Anyway, the Teleprompter is pissed because a shitty company run by shitty people is giving shitty bonuses to shitty employees.  And for some reason the Teleprompter is upset that when the government gave this shitty company free money, the company didn’t start acting the it wanted them to.  Anybody with half a brain could have expected this, but it (the Teleprompter) was absolutely blindsided.  The government could have just not bailed out the company, and then it would have failed, and then someone with competence would have come in and picked up the pieces that were still worth anything and rebuilt it.  But instead they bailed it out, saying it was too big to fail, too important of a company to just let collapse.  That’s how it was sold to us.  So if the company is so big and so important the way it was, shouldn’t we just let it continue to run the way it always has?  Why should people at the company act any differently now, after they’ve been told that they’ve constructed a monstrosity that CANNOT be allowed to fail, and after the government has committed itself, and then double-downed on the commitment, to keep it afloat?  Why would they act differently?

But the part I don’t really care for is that now, Obama’s Teleprompter is outraged on my behalf.  Well sorry, I don’t really need to hear its version of outrage.  I didn’t want my money going to that company in the first place, so I’m not all that heartbroken to find out that it’s now being spent wastefully.  I don’t need a half-assed, populist computer monitor to tell the president to tell me that the whole thing is an outrage at this point.  I EXPECTED it to be money well-wasted, so I feel almost a tinge of joy at the discovery that I was right.