Remember when Obama woke up one morning in a rage because of the retention bonuses paid to AIG employees? While there was no doubt that his outrage was manufactured and his anger faked purely for stoking his populist fires of rich versus poor, it seems he either ran out of rage or forgot to muster that rage when the employees for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae got their retention bonuses last week. While Freddie and Fannie are no less indebted to the government for their very existence, AIG is not the playground, or rather the honey pot, for former politicians to go and get rich. One can easily argue that Obama's feigned rage at the AIG bonuses was yet another example of his total ignorance of the business world. After all, if AIG is worth saving, and 165B "invested" to date suggests that someone in government feels that it is, then the task of saving AIG will require talented and motivated employees - who would stay if rewarded with a light at the end of the tunnel - retention bonuses being a standard tool for keeping talent in place when others are heading for the exits. So, while I understand the horrific public relations job AIG did justifying why they need to pay competitive packages to the talent they need to keep the doors open. The same argument could be made for Fannie and Freddie by anyone who has ever worked in the business world. However, why does Obama have selective rage? He clearly does not understand the "pay for performance" world in which most of us live, otherwise he would not have used the AIG bonuses to generate fake rage and score political points. I guess he scored all the points he needed or was oblivious to the fact that Fannie and Freddie employees got more in bonuses that did the AIG employees. Obama either needs to be consistent in his ignorance of business or own up to the utter hypocrisy of his actions. Neither bodes well for the future of our nation.
Shifting gears a bit, what would you do if a two-bit, pin headed despot had just demonstrated that he had a missile capable of reaching the shores of the United States...while members of the Iranian government, on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons watched the missile test with glee. There are a lot of things I would do in that scenario, but the stupidest thing that I could think of to do, and the absolutely last this I would do would be to cut funding for strategic, uniquely American missile defense systems. What in the world is Obama thinking? Does he think that by dumping on the United States in front of the rest of the world that everyone loves us now? Maybe this is how things work in community organizing circles, but when we are dealing with people who would love to detonate a nuclear device in Time Square, who cut people's heads off and post the video in the Internet, and who blow themselves up on crowded buses with school children on board, knocking the US down a few pegs in public will not mollify these people. Rather it will be seen as a demonstration of weakness and will drive further escalation of their fanatic fantasies. What a stupid move by Obama, no other way to call this one. The prestige of the Ivy League education is dropping like the stock market with every day in office. Makes me wonder whose papers Obama copied to get through school, because no one this obtuse can get through the day, much less graduate from Columbia and Harvard.
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