DADvocate

UPDATE Now it appears Dodd is more involved than I was led to believe in the original post. The Democrats are having a regular festival of finger pointing. As a friend told me earlier today, the Dems invented the Circular Firing Squad.

An amazing display of ineptitude.

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Driving home tonight and listening to Simply Money on WKRC in Cincinnati, the hosts mentioned that Christopher Dodd had inserted a clause into the bailout package that enabled AIG to give out the large bonuses that are not the talk of the town. I could hardly wait to get home and skewer Dodd.

Others had the same thought.

But wait, something fishy is underfoot. It appears the truth is quite the opposite.

The Wall St. Journal article identified above reported explicitly that it was Geithner and Summers who were rejecting Dodd's limits on executive compensation as too broad and demanding that already-vested payments be exempted: exactly the exemption that protected the AIG bonuses and which they're now trying to blame on Dodd:

The administration is concerned the rules will prompt a wave of banks to return the government's money and forgo future assistance, undermining the aid program's effectiveness. Both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, who heads the National Economic Council, had called Sen. Dodd and asked him to reconsider, these people said.

More interesting reading at the link above.

Dodd has been under fire recently for his sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide and his Irish cottage which is larger than most of our houses, plus all sorts of other stuff. Dodd's poll numbers are lagging. Maybe the White House has decided Dodd is expendable, that he can and will be sacrificed for the overall good of the Democratic Party.

Or, maybe, it's just more proof of Obama's incompetence.