

I agree with this bit of superficiality:



Ed Liddy sized up this situation when he got to AIG and came to the conclusion that the best course for taxpayers and for the financial system was to pay the bonuses. This gets back to something I wrote earlier: If Obama disagrees with Liddy's decision, he should either A) fire Liddy, or B) fire the guy who hired Liddy (Tim Geithner). What he should not do is go along with this Kabuki outrage, in which official Washington pretends it had no idea that big financial institutions — especially failing ones — might need to keep paying their top employees competitive salaries.

That would seem so obvious it need not be said, but apparently the entire press corps has decided to do the Kabuki dance along with the clown show on Capitol Hill.Look, I have no clue in the world whether it makes sense to pay these bonuses. This is what I do wonder: Why is Ed Liddy taking all this grief? The government brought him in to clean up this mess. As nearly as I can tell, he took the job for a dollar a year -- adjusted for inflation, that's less than FDR's dollar-a-year men got! -- and there is no disclosure in AIG's SEC filings to suggest that he is getting anything more than that (although to be sure we have to wait for the proxy statement). Why has Liddy become every federal politician's punching bag? One is forced to wonder why he does not just tell the Obama administration that they can find some other chump to wind down AIG.CWCID: Glenn Reynolds