The Villian has a face- -well sort of.

We should all be happy now that we have someone on which to focus our anger. These guys are the perfect scape goat. We don't know them, they are obviously well off, and they work for an insurance company that took government money. They are the absolute perfect patsies to take all of our wrath. Tax them at 90%, out them in public, haul them before congress and humiliate them.

Sounds like a screen play for a movie doesn't it? All we need is a hero to stand up and bring us to our senses about what is really going on. Jimmy Stewart would have been the perfect actor. Don't hold your breath. Our elected officials have appealed to our base nature calling for revenge. Never mind that these same public officials also took money from AIG at the same time. Chris Dodd and Barack Obama took over $225K for there election campaigns in 2008. The same Chris Dodd that put in the provision that let them keep those bonuses in the first place.

I don't know any of these villains, and I suspect you don't either. My guess is that they are not evil people. Overpaid, maybe, but I don't know that either. What I do know, is that most of them were losing their jobs. What I do know is that AIG needed them to work for a while longer and paid them a bonus not to leave. I also know that that is a fairly common practice. I also know that if most of us found ourselves in the same circumstance, we would take that money without a moments hesitation. With no shame or guilt attached. Indeed most everyone around us would feel sorry for us because we were loosing our jobs in a tough economy.

These folks were served up to us on a silver platter by the very folks who were their best friends a year ago, our elected officials.

There is a lot of guilt to go around in this mess. There was a lot of money sloshing around in the economy, and we all benefited at least in the short term. Our home values went up dramatically. In a sense we were all making the dreaded "windfall" profits that congress likes to tax. We had easy credit to buy anything we wanted whether we could afford it or not. We were all lined up at the same feeding trough and living high, at least for a while.

Now we face the day of reckoning, and we are angry. We need a face on which to target that anger, and now we have one. How convenient.

When I was a kid, I used to go to the movies and watch westerns. Seems that more often than not some innocent loser was always about to get lynched in those movies for some crime that he did not commit. As I recall, the real guilty party was always at the front of the mob leading the lynching. He was the guy always screaming to "hangem high". Once somebody is hung we generally quit looking for the real crook.

Kind of makes you wonder doesn't it?