What happens when you make brash generalizations? You make yourself look like a fool. What happens when you make generalized assumptions about an entire group of people? You betray your own prejudices.

That’s what I believe has happened – among other things – with the vilification of generalized, anonymous, faceless A.I.G. “Executives”. Certain members of Congress, along with the Attorneys General of various states, would have us believe that every executive who ever worked at A.I.G. is directly responsible for all the credit default swaps that landed them and the American economy in such turmoil. Furthermore, not only is it every executive’s fault – regardless of whether they were even in the same departments that handled those credit default swaps or not – all of those executives are also totally heartless, greedy, disgusting bastards who deserve to die for so blatantly disrespecting and victimizing the tax-payers by doing something so wrong, so dastardly, so disgusting as… receiving payment for their hard work, as dictated by contracts signed by those in charge, both at A.I.G. and in the Federal government. If we believe what we’re being told by the likes of Barney Frank, *every* executive is a criminal who deserves to be “named and shamed”, who deserves no sympathy for the death threats they and their families are being subjected to, and who ultimately deserves the first ever retroactive, personally targeted, over-the-top, 90% taxation that was just enacted by Congress, despite the fact such taxation legislation so blatantly violates the Constitution (another contract that no one seems to hold must esteem for these days.)

This is another rash generalization. Not only does it make those who make such generalizations look like fools, and not only does it betray their prejudices, but good people who have done absolutely nothing wrong are being hurt in the process.
Oh, and we, the American people, are also being hopelessly distracted from much more important and pressing issues.

This point is beautifully illustrated by none other than one of those awful executives from A.I.G, Mr. Jake DeSantis. He’s taking an awful risk revealing his name, but I believe that what he has to say is important. After all, didn’t our parents teach us to walk a mile in another man’s shoes before we criticize them? And no, not just so that when we do criticize them we’re a mile away and we have their shoes. No, no, the point is, we need to look at both sides before grabbing our pitchforks and running people out of town who may be completely and utterly innocent. Mob rule isn’t the answer here; reason is.
So for the sake of reason, I beg you to take a look at the letter of resignation which Mr. Jake DeSantis sent to Edward M. Liddy, the Chief Executive of A.I.G. It explains a few things from the point of view of the executives that we’re all being riled up to hate.

Click here to check it out.

Before any of us say another word about these executives, I wish we’d all calm down for a minute and think about a few things. First, contracts should be sacred and the government has no right to interfere with them, especially with regard to contracts that they themselves agreed to.

Secondly, before we let mob rule trump our reason, perhaps we should ask ourselves, who is it that’s trying to get us to behave like a bunch of vicious, thoughtless, violent rioters in the first place? Perhaps then we might have a better idea about what really went on here, and who’s really to blame. Not some faceless, nameless, villain of an executive, but some politicians who didn’t even bother to read the biggest, most expensive bill in the history of our country before they voted for it. They’re the ones who signed a contract before reading the fine print (hell, they didn’t even let us read it!) If that happened to us, the little people, we’d be the ones to blame. We’d be the ones with our credit ruined and our possessions being taken away. Yet Congress is trying to shift the blame and attention onto others, hoping they’ll get away with something tremendously stupid – which, by the way, we’re currently paying the price for. Congress entered into this contract, a contract which simply stated that executives – like any other employee of a company – should be compensated for their work. Whether the Congressmen and Senators now feel that compensation was too high, it’s too bad, so sad. It’s their fault for not reading the fine print. So hold them responsible, not the people who simply got paid for doing their job. If that contract can’t stand, if the government can interfere in that contract, then who’s to say they can’t interfere in one of yours? Who’s to say you won’t be the next villain to distract the people of America from yet another of Congress’ sins? Walk a mile in the shoes of those executives before being so quick to judgment, then maybe you’ll understand why this entire situation is so entirely wrong.

I’m just now watching Obama’s appearance on last night’s Tonight Show – thank you, Tivo! – and I just had to pause it. I couldn’t go any further without commenting on a few things, so this won’t be a full analysis, this is just me having to sound off now before I forget my initial reaction.

First off, here’s a direct quote I just transcribed from Obama. I’ll try to get an exact video clip of this line later on.

“”No, no, no, but, no, th-th-th-th… This is the point that I made, I think two days ago, when somebody asked, ‘Well, do you have confidence in Tim Geithner?’ I said, ‘Look, I’m the President. So ih-eh-uh, ultimately, all of this stuff is my responsibility. If I’m not, uh, giving him the tools that he needs, uh, to make sure that we’re moving this forward, then people need to look at me.”
- Barack Obama, Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 03-19-09, roughly 35-40 minutes into the broadcast.

Um, Mr. President, if it’s your responsibility to get Tim Geithner all the tools he needs to solve what you and your administration repeatedly refer to as the greatest financial and economic disaster to strike this country since the Great Depression, then why is it that you have time to go on a late night chat show, and yet you haven’t had enough time to fill the remaining 17 out of 18 presidential appointments within the Treasury Department? Tim Geithner is the only one you’ve appointed out of those 18 appointments, meaning Tim Geithner is operating without a full compliment of appointees on his staff, to assist him with this massive crisis.
Wouldn’t you say that’s a pretty big error on your part? Wouldn’t you say that’s an instance of you not giving Tim Geithner the “tools that he needs to make sure we’re moving forward”? Don’t you think filling those 17 appointments should be a higher priority than chatting it up with Jay Leno?
Hey, Mr. Obama, you asked us to look at you, you said this was your responsibility. We’re looking at you now.

Secondly, I will say that I was impressed with one question in particular that Jay Leno addressed to Obama. When he asked specifically about his concerns over Congress targeting specific individuals with 90% taxation legislation, did you notice that Obama didn’t even answer the question? He completely deflected and didn’t even come close to addressing Leno’s very legitimate concerns!
But then again, I guess you wouldn’t want to answer that question either, if you were presiding over a Congress that just passed legislation which violated the Constitution not just once, but twice.
Yet again, Mr. Obama, I’m looking at you. This is your responsibility, and you can’t even answer a drastically important question such as the one Jay Leno presented to you?
I sincerely hope I wasn’t the only one who picked up on that deflection, because that’s a very, very, very important question that we should all be demanding a satisfactory answer to.

Lastly, didn’t you just love how in every single answer, the only solution Obama presented to both the economic crisis AND the big AIG mess, was more regulation and oversight? That’s pretty funny, coming from the golden boy of the same Democratic party who repeatedly rejected Republican attempts at providing more regulation and oversight before this crisis even erupted, in an effort to put on the brakes before we hit an absolute catastrophe. Wasn’t it the Democrats who said that Fannie and Freddie were just fine, and that Republicans were doing nothing more than being evil “fear-mongers” for suggesting that a major global financial crisis was on the horizon and that we’d better act now through regulation and oversight?
Kinda funny that Obama thinks we should trust those very same Democrats to effectively implement that regulation and oversight now that the very same crisis the Republicans predicted has hit us at full force, that crisis the Democrats said didn’t exist and was nothing more than a Republican fantasy. But not only did the Democrats fail in that regard, but they also failed to put in any regulation and oversight into the massive stimulus bills they passed which led to this big AIG mess that Obama was commenting on.
Hmm, that’s at least two strikes, if not more. How many strikes will we allow the Democrats before we realize, hey, they have absolutely no track record of success and they flat out suck at implementing any kind of effective regulation and oversight, like the kind Obama was touting on Jay Leno?

Alright, now to hit play and finish the rest of it. I swear, I feel like pulling my hair out, this is so frustrating to listen to. So before my brain just fizzles out, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the whole debacle, so please, comment away and let me know what you think!

Oh, and by the way, just to add my voice to the chorus – let’s impeach Chris Dodd, shall we?