Another company took the bait. Not that anyone had a problem with that. The problem was that top management was able to get some of the cheese out of the trap.

“I, Barack Husein Obama, am outraged by this behavior!” he says, his beautifully chiseled face turned upward in the direction of AIG executives, as if Michelangelo himself had discovered a way to turn a block of marble into a frozen, three-dimensional snapshot of monotony. You’ll have to excuse him if he looks like he’s not breathing. He’s “choked up with anger”.

Don’t you know, silly AIG mouse, that when the federal government serves you stolen cheese on a silver mousetrap, you’re supposed to eat it head-first?

We’re reliving Animal Farm recast with mice. Some mice make the cheese. Other mice collect it and divvy it out. Then there’s the mice who beg for it, take it, and hope the top dogs (sorry, mice) are inept at building mousetraps. Now they have someone else’s cheese to make up for their old cheese. Mmm… cheese. In the meantime, the rest of you idiots are on line to put your own heads in the mousetrap, but damned if you’ll do it until you see other mouse skulls getting crushed first.

It seems that sufficient rules hadn’t been established as to what AIG executives could and couldn’t do with their bailout funds. I’ve always said: companies that run themselves into the ground ought to be closely monitored when they’re given a second chance to run themselves into the ground. Who knows what might happen?

This isn’t a bailout. It’s an illegal sting operation. To stay with the mouse metaphor, it’s like the federal government is sending out a bunch of mouse whores to street-walk on Wall Street. But when the public sees a couple of mice doing the nasty on the corner of Wall and Broad, everybody panics. Well, what did you think was going to happen? They’re mice. They fuck. That’s why they call them mice. (Had I gone with a tortoise and hare allegory, this latter point may have been a bit clearer.)

The notion that the bailouts come with strings attached goes beyond bailouts. Or, rather, the bailouts go beyond Wall Street. Funding of science comes to mind. Public schooling. Health care. There’s no Platonic ideal of how to run a company or cure a disease floating out there in imagination land, with all government having to do is tap into the magic with a bailout, welfare, or Medicare check. There are choices to be made. And when you accept a government check, you accept government’s way of doing things in place of your own. FYI: those are commands and that’s you obeying them. Just wait until we need to “save the newspapers”. (Nancy Pelosi is already talking about it.) We won’t want media companies wasting our tax dollars, so we’ll need to create strict standards for what kind of news constitutes unwasteful spending. If you’re slow to take a hint, reread that last sentence.

Obama had scheduled a speech Monday to announce new help for recession-pounded small businesses. But first, he said, he had a few words to say about AIG. He lost his voice at one point and ad-libbed, “Excuse me, I’m choked up with anger here.” It was just a light aside, but he meant the sternness of his remarks to come through.

“This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed,” Obama declared.

Let’s reflect on the monumental stupidity of this farce for a moment. And, to revert to the above Obama-as-statue-of-Michelangelo metaphor, let’s reflect on Obama’s monumental stupidity like pigeons at a Coney Island pier on July the 4th. What I’m calling “stupidity” here is sort of like the intuition a dog has when it walks up to another dog and sticks his face in its ass. It ain’t genius, but you might actually be impressed that somehow the dog knew sniffing other dogs’ asses was going to be perfectly acceptable. If he has nothing else, Barack Obama has the intuition of an ass-sniffing dog. He knows that people will be stupid enough to believe his anger is real. Or, more precisely, they’re stupid enough to believe that his anger means he’s surprised.