Quote of the Day (Sean Hannity, on Obama’s Call for Capping Banker Executives’ Pay)

The cap on executive pay for bankers accepting the government bailout program is “a dramatic move away from capitalism and toward socialism."—Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, quoted in Alex Roth and Corey Dade, “Mixed Reactions From Republicans Demonstrate the Dilemma Faced by the Party,” The Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2009

Years ago, I was out with a group of teenage friends when one guy drank so much that he began acting stupidly—enough so that his father eventually was called. As my friend bent over, vomiting for all he was worth, his father looked down at him and shook his head. “He’s going to learn,” he said at last.

Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the commentariate, such as Sean Hannity, are, against all predictable human behavior, reversing the cycle that my friend, like most teenagers, enacted nearly ago. The GOP got sick first, in the fall, as the economy doomed any chance they had of holding onto the Presidency and stemming the Democratic tide. It's only now, as the economy worsens and the headlines blare daily about the bloated bonuses and executive-office binges of the fat cats they supported for years, that they’re acting stupid.

Like his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama is proving unbelievably fortunate in his enemies. By all rights, last week should not have been a good one for the President. One after another of his appointees were forced to confess to trouble with paying taxes—not a good sign for an administration calling for sacrifice and economic fairness for all its citizens.

To the rescue came the GOP. Years ago, they acted like a posse, coming to teach those out-of-touch Democrats about the perils of disregarding the will of the people; in 2009, however, the same group has come to resemble The Over-the-Hill Gang.

Sure, some of their objections to Obama’s stimulus program (e.g., some items might take years to come to fruition and won’t help revive the economy now) don’t sound totally outside the realm of possibility.

But most of what we’re hearing from them—at a time when the news features daily stories about joblessness and wiped-out savings—is so mindless that it only confirms what Rush Limbaugh, in a comment so rawly and inanely honest that it became a gaffe, admitted not long ago: they hope Obama fails.

Hannity is acting under the mistaken belief that if you cry “socialist” loudly and long enough, people will come to believe you. This might have worked in the late 1940s, when the American Medical Association rallied to kill Harry S. Truman’s modest health-care plan, but it won’t now, for several reasons:

* Republicans, not Democrats, were the ones who made the first move toward wholesale government involvement in the economy in this last turn of the business cycle, when—at the urging of President Bush, Treasury Secretary Paulson, and Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke—they initiated the TARP program. And these weren’t the RHINO—Republicans in Name Only—moderate Republicans that the dittoheads loathe; these were diehard believers in the free market.

* Republican consultants kept crying “socialist” at Obama during the campaign. If it didn’t work then, who’s to think it’s going to work now?)

* When did capitalism become about rewarding failure?

* As it happens, Obama’s cap on executive pay is far less rough than it appears. It only applies to those accepting the government handout (sorry—I meant assistance), not to all bankers. Second, there is an out—senior executives might not get paid more than the amount up front, but can once the bank has recovered and the American taxpayer is repaid.

* Free-market conservatives and their GOP enablers have for years bleated about letting the market alone, about permitting those who risked starting an enterprise reap the rewards—and fall by the wayside when they don’t. Now the bankers—after being allowed to run wild over the last quarter-century, with one brake on their operations after another being lifted--are making like Oliver Twist, asking for more.

Americans thought that Wall Street, after being given life support, wouldn’t start acting silly again. But we were wrong. Let’s put it this way: I scan my 401K statement for one spot, any spot, on my diversified plan that recorded an upturn. Nothing doing. Yet we are told that financial services employees, after recording its most disastrous year in decades, still received $18.4 billion in bonuses. How do they manage to deserve any?

Remember that song "Stray Cat Strut" from the early 1980s? Well, beginning around the same time, we started to see a different version of that tune in corporate America: the Fat Cat Strut. The latter was a hit for far longer than the former, but at long last the giddy music has ceased and the dance has ended.

If they continue their obstructionist ways, Republicans will find themselves in an even worse position than they are now: not only blamed for the economy’s initial failure, but for the failure to revive it. Voters will say to them, as my friend’s father said years ago: They’re going to learn.