"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time,
but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
Abraham Lincoln
But you can bloody well try.
Senator Grassley is a ranking member of the Senate Finance Committe. As such, he presided over a decade of erosion of safeguards and balance in our financial system.
He is also a member of a political party and a government that had the lead in ruining our country, undermining the Constitution, and allowing financial racketeers like AIG to flourish.
The fellows at AIG are indeed amoral pigs, and they make no pretentions to be otherwise, whereas Chuck Grassley and his ilk are venal hypocrites who are attempting to deflect attention from their own significant role in the current financial crisis, and a disastrous foreign policy conducted under false pretenses for the enrichment of private interests and corporations.
Those who take his pious pronouncements seriously are born to be shorn, over and over, again and again.
"I don't know whether the [$165 million in bonuses] is an issue as much as just the chutzpah of the people running AIG," Grassley said. "That they could thumb their nose at the taxpayers, it's more that.
"The attitude of these corporate executives and bank executives, and most of them are in New York, that somehow they're not responsible for their company going into the tank," he said.
"I suggest, you know, obviously maybe they ought to be removed, but I would suggest that the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them [is] if they would follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I'm sorry and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide."
