House of Eratosthenes

Democrats may want to start thinking about a bailout for Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, whose political stock has slipped amid the financial meltdown.

As a five-term Democrat who blew out his last two opponents by 2-1 margins in a blue state that President Barack Obama won handily, Dodd, D-Conn., should be cruising to re-election in 2010. Instead, he’s feeling heat from a Republican challenger eager to make him a poster boy for the tumult in the housing and financial markets.

A recent poll showed former Rep. Rob Simmons running about even with Dodd, a former national Democratic Party chairman.

As head of the banking panel, Dodd, 64, has become a convenient target for voter anger over the economic crisis.

“The fact that we have been beaten up, beaten around the head for the last eight or nine months on a regular basis has contributed to it as well,” Dodd said.

Some of the worst blows came amid the furor over $165 million in bonuses American International Group Inc. paid some of its employees while receiving billions of dollars in federal bailout money. After first denying it, Dodd admitted he agreed to a request by Treasury Department officials to dilute an executive bonus restriction in the big economic stimulus bill that Congress passed last month. The change to Dodd’s amendment allowed AIG to hand out the bonuses and sparked a blame game between Dodd and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Dodd was guarded Thursday when asked about Geithner.

“This is obviously a matter that obviously should have been dealt with differently, but we are where we are,” he said.

Republicans branded Dodd’s reversal “astonishing and alarming” and fingered Dodd as the top recipient of campaign cash from AIG employees over the years.

The GOP is slamming Dodd, claiming he is cozying up to Wall Street insiders, raking in bundles of their campaign cash, shirking his banking panel duties and running for president as the economic crisis erupted in 2007.

This whole AIG bonus flap has me thinking of that scene in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex first gets out, right after she gobbles down that poor li’l goat. Remember when she’s tearing apart that little car with the kids in it, and Sam Neil comes at her with a lit flare. He trains her eyes on it by moving it back and forth, and then throws it off in the bushes, which makes her forget all about the kids and about him.

Road Flare Then Jeff Goldblum does the same thing, only not as well, and the T-Rex starts chasing off after him. Goldblum was playing Dr. Ian Malcolm, the “Life Will Find A Way” guy. Yeah. Life found a way to pay attention to what it wanted to, not what you told it to.

The T-Rex is you and me. The situation with these tasty humans running around, is the attempt to save capitalism by destroying it; we could say the tasty little boy is the auto bailout, the tasty little girl is the wave of tax increases that is surely coming, Sam Neil is the global warming scam and Jeff Goldblum is the government takeover of the banks. The lawyer that gets bitten in half would be any one of the number of other techniques being rolled out…the giveaways to the unions, the tinkering with the interests rates and wages, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Personally, I’d like to think of that lawyer as Rahm “Never Let a Crisis Go To Waste” Emmanuel. Or Sen. Dodd, that works for me as well.

The important thing, though, is the flares. The flares are the bonus payments to the AIG execs. If eaten, they wouldn’t keep a T-Rex fed for very long, which is appropriate because the payments to the AIG execs really don’t amount to anything. Nor are they symbolic of anything that should excite us in any sort of pejorative way; they symbolize free people making free choices to earn money competently disbursed for services honestly rendered, which was supposed to be our country’s primary reason for existing in the first place. The services weren’t honestly rendered, you say? They were retention bonuses. The service contracted was to stick around. Shenanigans may have been going on with AIG, but these aren’t them.

It doesn’t make any sense for the T-Rex to be chasing after those flares. We shouldn’t be wasting half a second on ’em. It’s just a primal instinct at work.

The first time the flare is used it works, and the second time, it doesn’t. I find that encouraging. It seems prophetic. Our current leadership, in spite of His fame as a charismatic speaker, does seem to have a success rate of about fifty percent when it comes to manipulating people. Using tools to manipulate people. Executive bonuses, road flares, teleprompters, DVD collections encoded for Region 1…on this issue, His chosen technique seems rather painfully obvious, and one wonders if the T-Rex is savage enough to fall for it. People are fed up with the bailout bonanza, so He’s going to wave around this flare — hey, look at those awful executives and their bonuses! — and we’ll go chasing after that, while he proceeds with bailout-this and stimulate-that, the very things that really pissed us off in the first place. I mean, look at the headlines on these stories about voter/taxpayer “anger.” And then when they interview the man-in-the-street about how cranky he’s getting, listen to what these guys are saying. Really listen. It isn’t that AIG people are getting bonuses that’s got them upset; it’s that their taxes are going up so that people they’ll never meet, people who took out mortgages they never intended to pay, can keep living in four-bedroom houses. It’s that hard work, personal sacrifice and good decisions don’t count for pig-squeeze anymore. That’s what has the T-Rex mad. It doesn’t want a road flare, it wants some tasty long-pig.

Well, I hope the AIG bonus-tactic ends up as a colossal Malcolm Maneuver.

But back to Dodd. This is probably the most important story of the whole week, because now a prominent democrat has been ensnared in this thing in such a way that he can’t get out of it. I’m hoping this is where the voters start to get it. This idea that the Washington crowd is going to ride in on a white horse and fix everything, that they can do no wrong now that we have such good, decent people in charge…it’s been dealt a serious blow. Well, good.

That really is a primary flaw in our democratic-republic workings, you know. The voters. It’s the way our brains are wired, somehow. Our noble public “servants” roll up their sleeves to fix our problems, and somehow, we believe that’s what they’re going to do. You’re just supposed to stand back, give ’em room, let ’em work, and if you so much as let out a peep of “Hey let’s think about it for a second or two” you’re almost dealt with as a traitor.

Said public “servants” could have made the problem under discussion, as recently as yesterday morning, maybe. And we don’t remember. We somehow keep thinking they’re a force for good.

Especially when it comes to dealing with money. That one…that one…really puzzles me. If there’s something I’m missing that explains it, please leave it in the comments below. I’d be grateful.

Another brilliant entry in Morgan’s Metaphors.

Perhaps you neglected to mention that Steven Spielberg is George Soros….
- rob | 03/20/2009 @ 10:20

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Dodd in TroubleFriday, March 20th, 2009

Dodd in Trouble
Friday, March 20th, 2009