Our junior Senator contrasted her carefully crafted image as a moderate last week by calling banking executives “idiots” for paying out $18 billion in bonuses to their best performing employees. McCaskill was the toast of the media after her comments in the well of the Senate. To us, McCaskill’s phony exasperation was frankly embarrassing.

We all know that in politics, perception is reality, and it IS a bad visual to witness auto executives seeking bailout money, flying into Washington on private jets. Or, struggling financial instituitions paying out bonuses after recieving billions in government money.

Now time for a little truth. In business, time is money. I would bet that if you calculate what the auto executives make, and then you divide that into the time they would have wasted waiting at the airport for a commercial flight; possibly waiting at a connecting airport to fly them to D.C., and then the time to grab their luggage and hail a cab to take them to Capitol Hill, it would show that it was more cost effective for them to take a private jet.

On the bonuses issue. Just because these companies lost money, does not mean that they didn’t have individual employees who performed well. You would think that with a struggling company trying to survive, retaining good employees would be a top priority. How do you retain performing employees without rewarding them for their hard work? And besides, a financial talking head said yesterday that these bonuses were not paid with bailout money, the bailout funds are in a segregated fund.

Related:

Tony’s Kansas City: “Claire McCaskill is a Missouri Democrat Millionaire who likes to yell at other Millionaires . . . But what I like about her most is that she doesn’t care who sees here Obama worship.” Read more…

Examiner.com: “But if ever there was a congressional case of the pot calling the kettle black, the junior senator from Missouri certainly takes top honors in the category.” Read more…

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