AIG Outrage: Earmarking Hogs are Hypocrites

Writing at NewsBusters, Brent Bozell said yesterday that the outrage from lawmakers over the $165 million in bonuses is mostly coming from hypocrites.

Just days earlier, President Obama signed an omnibus spending bill with $12.8 billion in self-serving earmarks for legislators during the economic crisis. How can the president and Congress lecture AIG? Don’t the earmarking hogs look like hypocrites?

Bozell continues, saying that liberals dismiss complaints about their drunken spending habits as just a conservative distraction. Why, it’s only a couple percentage points of the omnibus spending bill. So how much of the AIG bailout is for bonuses? The company has benefited from more than $170 billion in government bailout cash, or one dollar out of a thousand. If the earmarks are a tiny distraction, the AIG bonuses are less than insignificant.

But no one’s expecting the media to be consistent in their thinking. The same reporters who yawned past the excesses of the Democrats (and yes, the Republicans) stuffing their budget with pork – now they’re outraged, positively outraged at AIG.

Read it.