Imagine: 1. The world learns of the AIG bonuses. 2. Secretary Geithner comes out and says:
With the AIG mess, we can look for villains or we can look for solutions. We know that with these bonuses, some bad people are getting money they don't deserve. But other people, whose best interests would have been served by leaving early on, have instead stayed to help us figure out what happened and how to fix it. If there were a good way to separate them, we'd take it. We're exploring that. But these bonuses were promised before I became Treasury Secretary and, let me add, before Mr. Liddy was leading AIG. Neither of us, nor anyone else, is thrilled with the situation. But to take away the bonuses requires AIG to break contracts, which could both get expensive and lose us the help of people whose help we still need. When the restrictive language on bonuses was being put in the stimulus bill, Treasury asked Senator Dodd to help us carve out an exception so that we wouldn't aggravate the already almost intractable problems involved in sorting out AIG.
3. Senator Dodd comes out and says:
Indeed, I put the provision in the bill. I wasn't happy about it. I think it's pretty clear that I've been working to keep people from getting bonuses for running businesses into government receivership. When Treasury officials explained the situation to me, I was damn mad to have to choose between paying bonuses to people who don't deserve them or exacerbating the AIG situation. But with the stimuls bill on the fast track, I felt we needed to do the responsible thing even though it wasn't desirable from the standpoint of politics or justice.
I'm not saying everyone would have bought it. Or even that most people would have bought it. But a certain share of people would have understood, like the business owner who issues a final check, according to procedure, on the day he fires an employee who's been stealing. Granted, a lot of people wouldn't have understood. But still, let's look at what we have instead:
1. We didn't know anything about these bonuses. 2. Oops, we voted to approve them and President Obama signed the legislation. But we didn't know. It all happened so fast. 3. Okay, we knew all along.
The first approach would, at least, have allowed them to display real outrage over the situation, even as they acknowledged their role.
The second approach, which they took, revealed them to be liars and panderers, liable to be caught sooner or later for any and all manner of sins short of doing the responsible thing in a tough situation, which it looks like is what they actually did. I guess they danced around it so much because they couldn't believe it themselves.
