Chicago Thug Tactics, Washington Edition

Nice:

Obama the anti-capitalist to bankers:
"My Administration Is Only Thing Between You & the Pitchforks"

That sounds like something a socialist community organizer would say.
Oh... Never mind.
The Politico reported:

The bankers struggled to make themselves clear to the president of the United States.

Arrayed around a long mahogany table in the White House state dining room last week, the CEOs of the most powerful financial institutions in the world offered several explanations for paying high salaries to their employees — and, by extension, to themselves.

"These are complicated companies," one CEO said. Offered another: "We're competing for talent on an international market."

But President Barack Obama wasn't in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public's reaction to such explanations. "Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn't buying that."

"My administration," the president added, "is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

That was a pretty arrogant statement by Mr. Awesome.
If it comes to pitchforks why would they be directed at bankers?

Slublog and Hot Air have some commentary:

"So let me see if I've got this right. The Democrats helped cause the crisis through bad policy, fanned the flames of outrage against CEOs and Wall Street and are now saying they're the only ones who can protect the CEOs from all of those angry people out there." Indeed, and all they have to do to earn that protection is fire their CEO or whatever else The One demands. Refuse — and if you follow the link, you'll see that some of them actually want to return their TARP money — and they risk a visit from Timmy the Chin.

Anyone recognize the phrase "the anger is real," though? The last time Obama used it was in his speech on race to back off all the haters who thought, inexplicably, that a would-be president should have piped up about Reverend Wright sometime in the course of 20 years. Evidently it's a favorite formulation when he wants to lean on his audience. In which case, if he's so worried about pitchforks, instead of creepily exploiting the threat of mob violence to centralize the economy, how about our modern-day Lincoln gives a speech asking Americans to cool off before bailout fatigue leads to someone getting killed? After all, the anger really is real.

Correct me if I'm wrong...but didn't Obama say that private enterprise was the thing that would get us through the financial crisis?  Wasn't Obama was going to be the President who rejected fear-mongering and scare tactics?  Wasn't he the Great Uniter?

HOPE!  CHANGE!

There's my two cents.


PS - for those of you who were paying very close attention, you're correct that while the answer to all of my rhetorical questions above is yes, the first one is also correctly answered as no.  Isn't Obama amazing?