Obama: AIG is like … a suicide bomber

posted at 10:19 am on March 19, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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I’m pretty sure this won’t go down in history as Barack Obama’s finest moment:

But today, President Obama took that rhetoric in a different direction. He actually upped the ante explaining that AIG is like a suicide bomber.

“We had to step in, it was the right thing to do, even though it is infuriating,” Obama said, explaining why the government needed to bail out the troubled banks.

“The same is true with AIG,” he said. “It was the right thing to do to step in. Here’s the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.”

Well, that’s simply not true.  We sent $900 million to suicide bombers.  We gave AIG over $150 billion.

Speaking of which, now that we’ve identified Chris Dodd as a liar on the bonus codicil in Porkulus, isn’t it time to do the same for Barack Obama and the White House?  Let’s recall what Dodd said was his reason for rewriting his amendment to allow the AIG bonuses:

BLITZER: Well, so just to be precise, what we’re talking about, this mysterious loophole that was inserted at the last minute that allowed these bonuses in effect — now these bonuses, $165 million, to go forward. What I hear you saying is that, you personally, you did this in order — at the request of officials at the Treasury Department, Timothy Geithner, among others.

DODD: Well, I didn’t say who it was. But just say this, I wouldn’t have modified my own amendment at my own insistence. I mean, I spent a long time to having people try to be — change it. And obviously they came. And the alternative was losing the amendment. And I didn’t think we should do that at all.

BLITZER: Who asked you at the Treasury Department to do it?

DODD: Well, they were people, obviously, coming and negotiating with the staffs back and forth. And I don’t know their names specifically, it was at a staff level, people were talking about it.

Gee, would this be the same Treasury Department from the same administration that were “shaking with outrage” over these very bonuses?  Dodd’s a liar, but he’s not the only one in this debacle.  A conspiratorially-minded person might conclude that the administration deliberately enabled the bonuses so they could stoke populist outrage and push through more of their anti-business agenda.

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