As Reagan Said: "There They Go Again"

The leftists at the Democratic Party are getting better at disguising their hypocrisy, incompetence and dirty-dealings under protestations of helplessness. The ever-charming Barney Frank is a fine example of Democrat newspeak. When asked about why certain business executives are being singled out for tax hits, but not others, Frank has the answer. "It's too late to do anything about it."

Barack Obama, savior of the little people, announced on Thursday that he is going to "get our money back" by imposing huge tax consequences on financial institutions which have paid back their TARP money but are now giving their executives outrageous bonuses. Those dirty rats. The problem is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are doing the same thing, and they are the chief villains in the mess that created the housing/mortgage crisis in the first place. The administration approved $900,000 base salaries, $3 million in deferred payments and $2 million in bonuses for the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac CEOs. Barney Frank was sleeping with those present and past CEOs (in one case, literally) so it was logical to ask him why those bloodsuckers are being exempted from the punitive taxes. And good ole Barney had the answer: "Those bonuses are too high, but there's nothing that can be done about it--it's too late."

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac received their TARP funds in exactly the same way and in the same proportions as, say, Bank of America. It's not too late to punish the BofA execs, according to Obama, but far too late to punish the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac execs according to Frank. Since the funds were distributed at exactly the same time, it is entirely incomprehensible that one is timely and the other too late. But then Barney Frank is frequently incomprehensible. He was also unable to explain (or comprehend) that all those punishments will be passed right on to the customer/taxpayers who provided the TARP funds in the first place. But those evil bankers who lent the poorly-secured funds to people who couldn't pay for the loans must be punished. Never mind that Frank and his buddies were the ones who forced the banks to do exactly that via threats to withhold Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac backing and government sanctions for "red-lining."

So in his inimitable fashion, when pressed to give a reasonable distinction between the bankers and the more friendly CEOs at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Frank merely started shouting. "Nothing can be done now. The Senate should have passed the bill that we passed [in the House]. We passed a bill. Look, we're the legislators. We passed a bill in the House in 2009 with regard to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would have prevented these from being done." Loudly done, Mr. Frank, but you still haven't explained the distinction. He then went into a discussion of retroactivity of the possible punitive measures, still failing to draw the distinction.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not alone in being exempted from any CEO punitive taxation. General Motors and Chrysler, owned now by the federal government and their fellow-travelers in the United Auto Workers union, are likewise exempt. Since Frank wasn't asked about GM or Chrysler, it became the task of other Democrats to find a distinction. So far, several have been asked, and like Frank, none of them can find any logical reason for the distinction. Likewise, all the Democrats are either clueless or disingenuous about who will ultimately pay for those pseudo-penalties. After all, "rich people" will suffer the most, and all's fair in love and class-warfare. Consumers? Consumers! We don't need no stinking consumers.

Meanwhile, seventy Republican Congressmen (aka "the voices crying in the wilderness") have called on tax-dodging Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to cancel the bonuses for the government-owned/government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives. They are not running as late on this action as you might think. When the whole brouhaha began, it appeared that all financial CEOs would be equally punished. Obama had even proposed a 90% tax on the bonuses, but that went a bit farther than even his fellow leftists could swallow. So instead, the Democrats left the actual penalties hanging and waited until Christmas Eve, already a focal point for a Senate vote on health care, and stealthily passed exemptions for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (with GM, Chrysler, and possibly AIG left for later exemption).

Geithner's response to the Republican objections has been to find ways to pour even more money into Fannie and Freddie than was allowed by the original Congressional cap. Geithner simply circumvented the $400 billion cap on "emergency transfers" by handling it as routine business not requiring Congressional approval. To his weasel credit, however, Geithner at least explained that the GM and Chrysler bonuses resulted from "unforeseen circumstances." It's nonsense, of course, but it's better than what Rep. Frank was able to come up with.