No wonder Democrats are tripping over themselves to denounce the bonuses paid to AIG executives.  They’rre trying to try to deflect attention from their votes to guarantee such bonuses (when they voted for the “stimulus” which included a provision doing just that).

Michael Barone sees their grandstanding as a “moment of panic for House Democrats” and presenting an opportunity for Republicans:

This was a moment of panic for House Democrats. Almost all of them, and not a single House Republican, had voted for the stimulus package which specifically authorized such bonus payments. A bill that no one was given the opportunity to actually read. You don’t have to be a political genius to see what peril that poses for just about every Democratic incumbent and the opportunity it presents for every Republican candidate.

Emphasis added.

The fact that Democrats rushed the passage of this multi-hundred billion dollar boondoggle is going to hurt them as much as the bill’s content.

What Ann Althouse said about Chris Dodd will soon apply to those Democrats who voted for the “stimulus.”  The Connecticut Democrat contended he would have rejected a provision allowing for AIG bonuses had he “known at the time that there were any A.I.G. bonuses involved.”  Senator, it’s your job to to know what’s involved in the legislation your vote for and propose.  That’s what your constituents elect you to do.

And Althouse said Dodd’s was an “impossibly lame excuse. It’s his job to know. He holds a public trust. Which he doesn’t deserve.”

That applies to all those who voted for the “stimulus,” particularly those grandstanding about the AIG bonuses.  And who knows what else they find cause to criticize when the public becomes aware of other provisions slipped into the “stimulus.”

As the Obama Administration puts off until April a government efficiency plan promised in February, we’re reminded yet again that the president still has not filled the top positions at the Treasury Department.  Given that economic woes our nation faces (about which he continually reminds us), shouldn’t that be his primary focus?

Today completes the second month of Barack Obama’s presidency and it’s not just key positions in that key Department which remain unfilled.  Not just that, two of his cabinet appointees, Kathleen Sebelius to HHS and Gary Locke to Commerce, have yet to be confirmed.

So, let’s compare Obama’s record in picking a cabinet with that of his much maligned predecessor, recalling that the incumbent had five more weeks to staff his Administration before taking office than did George W. Bush just over eight years ago.

As Wikipedia provides the days the various Department Secretaries took office which I summarize below.  In preparing this chart, we see that Bush did a better job of staffing the upper echelons of his Administration than the incumbent has done.

Check below the jump to see the appointees and the dates they took office:

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As a Jew, I shudder every time I see Bernie Madoff on the news.  Even though most of the people whom he bilked were also Jewish, I fear some people may attribute his misdeeds to his faith, even though his professional actions violated so many tenets of Jewish ethics.  He is not only a bad man, but also a bad Jew.

Similarly, as a gay man, I cringe when I see such people as Barney Frank take the public stage.  There is no doubt that Mr. Frank is a very, very bright man who perhaps comes up with more clever quips than any of his congressional colleagues, yet he is also a vicious partisan with a very fixed vision of the world.  He rarely admits his mistakes.

Watching him join what Michelle Malkin has called The Kabuki Theater of AIG Outrage, grandstanding over executive bonuses at the troubled company while silent on worse outrages at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I wonder how the American people see his hypocrisy.  And if they do take note of it, will their unfavorable opinion of him translate into a negative opinion of gay people, given that he is the most prominent openly gay politician in America.

Having read some of my posts on the Massachusetts Congressman, Blogger Bill Jacobson asked me to consider whether “Barney Frank is bad for gays.”  In offering his thoughts on the matter, Jacobson notes how Frank’s political prescriptions are reminiscent of “political witch hunts” which cheapen public discourse.

In sum, I think he is.  While most gay activists focus on the prominence of this openly gay man as the chair of an important House committee, I see instead a man ever eager to engage in partisan warfare and always ready to blame his ideological adversaries for whatever problems face the nation.  If people identify gay people with Frank, they will see us a group who fails to take responsibility for our actions and instead continually blames others.

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Whenever a prominent Republican does something which offends the sensibilities of the politically correct gay élite, they rush to release a statement condemning said individual in particular and the Republican Party in geneeral. At times, they do with good reason as a number of Republicans over the years have said some pretty obnoxious things about gay people and proposed some pretty odious policies.

But, when a Republican shows a degree of tolerance for gay Americans, indicating perhaps that he (or she) believes we should welcome gays into the party’s ranks, he is met mostly by silence from the major gay organizations. Yeah, a few might say something ever once in a while, especially if the MSM picks up on it, but their words seem forced, perfunctory.  And to be sure, some of the left-of-center gay blogs will pick up the story. Towleroad and Queerty have a pretty good record on things like this.

How many gay organizations, for example, praised Mary Cheney for giving more money to defeat Proposition 8 than did Matt Foreman, the immediate past executive director of the far left National Gay and Lesbian Task Force?

On the whole, any openness a prominent Republican shows to gay men and lesbians does not draw the attention as does intolerance. It simply doesn’t fit their narrative of narrow-minded Republicans.

And sometimes, Log Cabin, an ostensibly Republican organization, eager to join the chorus of criticism of a politically incorrect Republican, remains silent when a prominent Republican reaches out to gays.

In today’s Washington Blade, two former Log Cabin officials, Christopher Barron and Jimmy LaSalvia, provide yet another example of this phenomenon. After the new Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele indicated opposition to an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting same-sex marriage and his support for “legal protections for gay couples,” he was met by silence from leading gay organizations:

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He refuses to criticize his successor:  “There are plenty of critics in the arena. He deserves my silence.”