The Writing on the Wall

Imagine for a second you and your spouse are outside doing yard work while your son and daughter play inside. You instructed your son that while you were outside there was to be no TV, as he needs to watch his sister. But when you wrap up and come inside you hear him quickly turn off the TV in the back room and waltz out into the hall like nothing happened. Then as you start to express your suspicions, he begins to panic, but his eyes lite up as he looks into his sister's room and yells "look, look at what she's done!" You turn to see the walls covered in crayon and marker, while the sister runs and hides in the closet. Encouraged that your focus is no longer on him, your son continues to direct your anger toward his sister. "Look at what she's done, it's a crime" he cries. "Something needs to be done, she needs to be punished." As you begin scolding your daughter for her crayola fiasco, your son quietly breathes a sigh of relief as he retreats slowly into his room, hoping all the time you forget that it was he who actually gave her the crayons so she wouldn't bother him while he watched TV, and it was he who truly let you down. Guys, the dirty misdirection and deflection of responsibility carried out by the boy in this story is EXACTLY what our politicians in Washington are doing right now with this AIG bonus fiasco. They are the ones who, in what amounts to a basically a money laundering scheme, squandered BILLIONS into AIG over the past months, knowing all along about the AIG bonuses. They"supplied the crayons" and watched AIG spiral downward while it served their political purposes. The public, like the suspicious parents, were starting to call the politicians out on their reckless irresponsibility, so they trumped up phony outrage at AIG execs to divert the anger of the American public. Yes it's despicable that these execs get multi-million dollar bonuses, and I wish they weren't getting a dime either, but it's our politicians that are committing the far greater sin. First off, as much as I despise those greedy corporate execs, those bonuses do belong to them. They are binding with a VALID CONTRACT, and the tactics Washington is threatening right now should absolutely outrage every single American. If the government can simply overturn any valid contract at will, their power over all of us will have reached a point that would make Hitler jealous. Retroactive taxation! Are they out of their minds?? We cannot allow the constitution to be trampled on like this. The government has no right, no matter how big a scumbag their target is, to break a valid contract. That is literally the foundation...nay, the cornerstone of free-market capitalism. And the millions being "wasted" on these bonuses is NOTHING compared to the billions the government has squandered away to special interests and foreign countries thru the AIG laundromat. It's despicable. And the icing on the politicians-destroying-our-country cake is the trillion plus dollars the Fed just printed print this week to "buy bonds and mortgage-backed securities." Translation: our dollar will be worth about toilet paper soon if we keep this up. Washington, you have got to stop treating us like idiots. The American public, like the parents in the story, are slowly catching on. Trying to distract our anger towards business executives to hide your own sins, while threatening to expand your power to terrifying, unconstitutional levels, is a new low for you....and that's saying something! JRD