Here’s the lowlight from today’s hearings that has Shep drawing (overheated) comparisons to McCarthyism and the boss worrying, not unreasonably, that Congress’s spiraling anti-AIG demagoguery is going to get someone hurt or killed. Why this turd can’t promise to keep the names secret is beyond me; if simple decency isn’t a good enough reason, he might want to consider the effect this is going to have on the talent pools troubled banks are trying to draw from. Want to hear Barney Frank read your name on national television for the edification of every angry populist lunatic watching? AIG, Citigroup, and Bank of America are now hiring!

What makes this especially galling, of course, is not only Frank’s own culpability in the financial crisis — which he’s now going to “fix,” you’ll be glad to know — but the imperiousness he displays here and in his statements about asserting the feds’ “ownership rights” over AIG. What a wretch.