Certain esteemed *ahem* members of the US Senate and the Obama administration are shocked — shocked, I say!! — to learn that AIG is using some of the taxpayer-funded bailout money it received to pay for executive bonuses. Here are the numbers:

This prompted all kinds of outrage in Washington and beyond. The Attorney General of New York, Andrew Cuomo, is planning to subpoena AIG to find out exactly who received this money and exactly how much. Harry Reid called the bonus money “beyond outrageous.” Nancy Pelosi, everyone’s favorite grandma, pulled out some of the best adjectives of all: “unconscionable” and “extravagant,” to name a few. The messiah himself, once again finding himself strangely impotent in the face of real life, declared this an “outrage” and an affront to our “fundamental values.” Barney Frank, rightly noting the taxpayers’ 80% ownership of AIG, mused that “maybe it’s time to fire some people.” In its defense, AIG claims that it was contractually obligated to make these disbursements.

SIDEBAR: Are you paying attention to this, all you banks who took the government’s money? Did you really think there wouldn’t be a nightmarish tangle of strings attached? As Pops always used to say, you can do whatever you want with your own money; if you’re using my money, I get to have a say. So to all you banks and financial institutions who mismanaged your companies and then accepted the government’s money as an easy way out, I hope you enjoyed your autonomy.

Let’s put this in some perspective here, okay? I mean, $165 million is a lot of money. A lot. But you know what’s an even more humongous amount? Ginormous, even? $170 billion. That’s billion with a B. All these elected officials are having a major cow over an amount of money paid out in bonuses that represents one-tenth of one percent of the amount of the bailout AIG received. Again, for clarity: $165 million in AIG bonus money is equal to roughly 0.1% of the $170 billion that the taxpayers were compelled, without their consent, to donate to the corporate sinkhole known as AIG. So please, senators, congresspeople, and messiah, spare me your manufactured indignation. Now here’s one final number for you to put in your pipe before you start smoking:

Yep, you read that right. Despite the infusion of $170 billion in taxpayer dollars to AIG, they still managed to post a $61.7 billion dollar loss for the 4th quarter of 2008. I must have missed all the outrage caused by that, right?

Oh, by the way, my favorite quote of the day by an outraged senator comes from Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa: