Quote of the Day (Amy Poehler, on Fortunate Recipients of the Swine Flu Vaccine)

“Can you not read how mad people are at you? When most people saw the headline 'GOLDMAN SACHS GETS SWINE FLU VACCINE' they were super happy until they read the word 'vaccine.'”—Amy Poehler, asking why Goldman Sachs receives 200 doses of the desperately needed swine flu vaccine for employees, in the “Really? With Seth and Amy” segment of Saturday Night Live, November 7, 2009

I came across Poehler’s routine in yesterday’s New York Times in Maureen Dowd’s column—one of the better ones that the Gray Lady’s resident redhead has produced in quite a while.

A week ago, I was afraid when I read that Dowd was one of the journalists favored with a recent audience with President Obama. Not that I mind the President talking to the Fourth Estate—it’s just that, when the group is composed of reporters and columnists from media organizations exclusively associated with liberal politics, it looks—well, slanted. Like the kind of thing the Bush people used to do when they let Dick Cheney out to bare his teeth and scare innocent children every time he appeared on Fox News.

Anyway, Dowd showed at least some spunk when she took the President to task for not making reform of Wall Street a major priority. Maybe not as fierce as in her old “Bushfellas” mode (“The President has not been strong on this issue”), but it’s a start.

People, this is an issue, because of its longtime commitment to populism and economic security, that the Democratic Party should own. If I were Michael Steele of the GOP, I’d be calling all my party’s fat cats, asking them to lie low for a little while, kind of like a crazy aunt kept away in an attic.

Oh, but wait a minute. It turns out that the Democrats have their own fat-cat contributors, too. All that talk about campaign-finance reform—about how the GOP always enjoyed this unfair advantage in war chests come every Presidential election cycle—went out the window the second the Democrats had a chance to get back in the White House.

Now it’s one thing for campaign-finance reform to be foiled and/or forgotten. It’s quite another, though, when the Obama administration failed to make a serious try at legislating away the abuses that caused our current mess in the first place.

Last year’s crisis—no, crises—made it clear that Wall Street would have to be saved from a greed so extreme that, even at best, it verged close to criminality. In agreeing to the bailout package, Bush and Obama forgot the basic rule of FDR: before you can give people confidence in the system again, you have to pass laws to make sure Wall Street can be trusted.

Instead, what did Bush and Obama do? In the government bailout, throw money at people who got us in this mess.

A few weeks ago, a relative of mine recalled a recent business conference where a representative of one of the companies benefiting from all this government largesse noted that his bank took the money, “even though we didn’t need it.”

Now Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase have announced that they’ll be giving out $30 billion in bonuses—up 60% from last year. All this while the small-business entrepreneurs who are the engines of growth in the economy are becoming asphyxiated from lack of credit from the banks.

Fine words on Wall Street about how “We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess” are all well and good, but where’s the action? Without that, a lot of people are going to share Ms. Poehler’s sentiment from last week’s SNL.