Hotline After Dark -- Resident Evil?

"World News" led with AIG bonuses. "Evening News" led with AIG bonuses and featured a taped interview with special inspector gen. for Iraq Stuart Bowen Jr. "Nightly News" led with AIG bonuses.

Last night's TV coverage was dominated by Pres. Obama's announcement that he asked Treas. Sec. Tim Geithner to use all legal tools to block the AIG exec bonuses. Among the reaction:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): "In fairness to the president, he's getting blamed for the mistakes of a prior administration. This was being done by the Federal Reserve last September without any congressional input. ... I'm afraid that the ability of the Obama administration to get the funding with the proper safeguards to help us get out of this will be hindered politically because of the failures last year to do it right" ("Rachel Maddow Show," MSNBC, 3/16).

More Frank: "I do think, as the owner of the company, we can say, 'You know what?' ... You were going to get a bonus for this or that performance. I mean, even in those companies, you don't get a bonus for breathing. There has to be some performance. And I think it is possible to argue as the owners that the performance did not, in fact, meet reasonable standards. I don't know that; that's the line we're going to pursue" ("NewsHour," PBS, 3/16).

WH Council of Economic Advisers' Austan Goolsbee, on his comment that AIG should have gotten the Nobel Prize for evil: "What I was talking about was the financial products division, where AIG essentially was an insurance company that strapped a hedge fund on its back that ran wild and ... brought multi-hundred billion dollar obligations onto the American taxpayer. And now, this same group have given themselves multi-million dollar bonuses. And boy, after the year that they have just had, I found that to be pretty cheesy" ("Situation Room," CNN, 3/16).

Weekly Standard's Ham: "There's nothing that brings people in Washington together from both sides of the aisle faster than the need to get on the right side of a populist backlash" ("O'Reilly Factor," FNC, 3/16).

More after the jump.

(KATHERINE LEHR)

Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ): "None of this should have surprised any of us. ... And it was actually out there also for Secretary Geithner to understand coming into this, as well. ... So it's only now that it's making headlines that the president is coming back and basically second-guessing his own treasury secretary on this. Why Secretary Geithner didn't raise this when he first understood it is beyond me" ("NewsHour," PBS, 3/16).

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), asked if he's satisfied with the responses from the WH: "I'm not satisfied. ... They have to renegotiate their contracts. There is no reason why when the federal government is poised to do another $30 billion that, in fact, we can't insist that those contracts get renegotiated, and renegotiated in such a way in which those bonuses simply don't take place."

Menendez, asked if he trusts Geithner: "I trust Secretary Geithner. He's facing the biggest array of challenges that any Treasury secretary could face at one time without even an assistant secretary confirmed underneath him. ... The bottom line is, I understand about not abrogating contracts, not breaking contracts, but, look, this is about telling them you just cannot live this way. You have to renegotiate" ("1600," MSNBC, 3/16).

FNC's Hume: "This is a problem for AIG, but it is a big problem for the president. He has already added substantially to the bailout money previously provided to AIG and to others and will almost certainly need to add more, much more to address the continuing credit crisis. This seems to be one reason the administration seems so hesitant to put forth a plan to fix the financial sector. The amount of money needed to absorb the bad assets on the books of financial institutions is huge, and it's not as if the administration has any money to spare" ("Special Report," 3/16).

Goolsbee, on why the admin. won't let AIG just collapse: "The financial rescues, they only ever grudgingly do them. And it's only to prevent the collapse of the financial system. So in a circumstance like this, if you're going to do something to cover up for some huge blunder that these guys have committed, you've got to have some buy in on the part of the executives at these companies that they're going to play by the rules. I mean this seems like totally outrageous" ("Situation Room," CNN, 3/16).

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA): "The boneheads are the people in the previous administration and this administration who gave out over $170 billion of our money and did not, in fact, do what anyone else giving money does, which is ensure that the money is not a conduit for simply paying out bonuses" ("Hardball," MSNBC, 3/16).

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer: "This is not so much an economic issue as a psychological and a political issue. Economically, if you add up all the bonuses, it's less than 1/10 of one percent of the bailout to AIG alone, so it's lunch money. Psychologically, it's important because there's outrage in the country, and ... unless there's an appeasement in the anger in the population who are going to have to support the next bailout, which is going to be a trillion dollars, the money won't be made available, Congress will deny it. So that's why you get the president heaping opprobrium on these miscreants who made the bad deals and now are getting the bonuses."

More Krauthammer: "I'm all in favor of keeping this heaping opprobrium. I would deny them the bonuses if possible. I would be for an exemplary hanging or two. Have it in Times Square, invite Madame Defarge. You borrow a guillotine from the French and we could have a party. If that's what it takes to maintain popular support, let's do it. But it's not going to change anything economically" ("Special Report," FNC, 3/16).

CNN's Dobbs: "I'm calling for Liddy to be fired. I'm calling for the Board of AIG to be fired here tonight, and looking forward ... we can't afford in this country any longer to tolerate corporate leaders who don't understand the basic values of this country and understand that an era has ended and it's time now to put their shareholders first and to put their personal interests behind that of the nation. It would be refreshing to see it even occasionally when it comes to Wall Street in particular" ("Lou Dobbs Tonight," 3/16).