Inside Politics

UPDATED:

UNFORGETTABLE

“The stock market was intoxicated with the Obama administration’s toxic asset plan. Whatever its contempt for the upper middle class that acquires wealth through salaried work and bonuses, Team Obama still has eyes for the hedge fund class, which will be ladled out taxpayer dollars to make one-way bets on problematic bank assets,” Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. writes.

“Yet the AIG bonus episode, the administration’s one true disgrace so far, will not soon be forgotten,” Mr. Jenkins said.

“Tim Geithner is rightly on the hot seat for saying he didn’t know about the bonuses until just weeks ago - because he should have quelled this furor before it ever got started. Instead he played dumb and climbed aboard the outrage bandwagon - and let Mr. Obama do the same.

“There is not a shred of justice in the hysteria that followed. As AIG chief Ed Liddy explained on the Hill last week, the people receiving retention bonuses were not the same people who launched AIG’s unhedged housing bets that brought the company down. Those people were gone. Their pay is already being clawed back.

“Those who remained had been asked a year ago to stay and work themselves out of a job. In accepting the terms offered to them, they committed no offense (say, failing to pay taxes). Their only crime was possessing marketable knowledge - all the more marketable because of the opportunity for hedge funds and other counterparties to profit from AIG’s distress. Had the company submitted to Chapter 11 rather than a government takeover, a bankruptcy judge might well have authorized identical incentives to minimize losses and maximize recovery for legitimate stakeholders.”

A WHOPPER

“President Obama is famous for building up straw men, then knocking them down. You know, on the one hand, some would have government do nothing at all to help the economy, on the other, there’s his plan,” Fred Barnes writes in a blog at www.weeklystandard.com.

“This is a transparent (and crude) rhetorical device, but that didn’t stop Obama from trotting out a whopper [Tuesday] night in his second prime-time press conference at the White House,” Mr. Barnes said.

” ’Now the alternative is to stand pat and to simply say, “We are just going to not invest in health care. We’re not going to take on energy. We’ll wait until next time that gas gets to $4 a gallon. We will not improve our schools. And we’ll allow China or India or other countries to lap our young people in terms of their performance. We will settle on lower growth rates and we will continue to contract, both as an economy and our ability to provide a better life for our kids.” That, I don’t think, is the better option.’”

Comments Mr. Barnes: “The word ’better’ means of two options, that one and his. So it’s either his option or the end of America as we know her. And that, from the great orator of our time.”#

ANOTHER WHOPPER

“At his press conference [Tuesday] night, President Obama insisted once again that he inherited the budget deficit, and ’we’re doing everything we can to reduce that deficit,’” Peter Ferrara writes in a blog at foxnews.com.

“But the deficits over the next 10 years that Obama proposed in his budget are not George Bush’s deficits. They are the deficits that Obama has proposed, resulting from the $1 trillion in increased spending he adopted in the no-stimulus stimulus bill, and the $400 billion supplemental spending bill he supported and also adopted the following week, and the $275 billion housing bailout he proposed the next week, and the $1 trillion bank bailout plan his Treasury secretary just proposed this week, and the $638 billion he has proposed as a ’down payment’ on a new national health insurance entitlement. The health insurance plan will be the most expensive entitlement of all - serious estimates are that it will cost at least $1.2 trillion or more. Does this sound like he is ’doing everything we can to reduce that deficit’?

“The budget Obama proposes for this year increases federal spending by a fiscally insane 34 percent over the budget adopted for last year, with a total of $4 trillion in federal spending, the highest EVER,” said Mr. Ferrara, who is director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation.

NO GAY UNIONS

The Hawaii Senate rejected an effort Wednesday to force a vote on same-sex civil unions, essentially killing the measure, the Associated Press reports.

The vote on the legislative maneuver was on the short end of an 18-6 vote, three short of the nine votes required to force the bill from a Judiciary Committee that had deadlocked 3-3, and put it on the Senate floor for a full vote. About 18 of the 25 senators had indicated they support civil unions, but they lacked the political willpower to go against Senate President Colleen Hanabusa and most of her leadership team, which opposed the effort.

Ms. Hanabusa has supported civil unions but said she didn’t want to override the normal lawmaking process by lifting the bill from its committee. Panel chairman Brian Taniguchi said the bill still could be amended and revived, but that probably wouldn’t happen until next year.

Dennis Arakaki, executive director of the Hawaii Family Forum, said the senators “realized the impact of this issue. They may have been looking for rationale of how they could either avoid the issue or put it to bed.”

DEFENDING FAILURE

“It’s OK for Republicans to want President Obama to fail if they think he’s jeopardizing the country, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told members of his political party Tuesday night,” CNN political editor Mark Preston wrote.

Speaking to about 1,200 people at the annual fundraising dinner of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Mr. Jindal denounced the very premise of the question - “do you want the president to fail?” - as the Democrats’ “latest gotcha game” and “political correctness run amok.”

“Make no mistake: Anything other than an immediate and compliant, ’Why, no sir, I don’t want the president to fail,’ is treated as some sort of act of treason, civil disobedience or political obstructionism,” said Mr. Jindal, already the subject of 2012 presidential speculation, though he has played down such talk.

Since Rush Limbaugh said he hoped Mr. Obama would fail, Republicans have been pressed by Democrats and their media allies to comment on the conservative radio talk-show host’s words.

Mr. Jindal said: “My answer to the question is very simple: ’Do you want the president to fail?’ It depends on what he is trying to do.”

• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or e-mail Greg Pierce