No Bonuses for Field Docs

As far as I can determine the reason the taxpayers - that's you and I - have to fund $165 million in bonuses for employees of AIG Financial Products is they came up with the ideas a few years back to create trillions of dollars worth of arcane and cockamamie financial products known as credit default swaps.

The value of those swapstanked after the housing market fell into the cellar and we taxpayers bailed out AIG to the tune of $180 billion or so. We taxpayers need to provide bonuses to AIG Financial whizz kids - creating 73 millionaires in the process - because only they have the skills to "unwind" their own mistakes, or we'll be sending even more bailout bucks to the leafy rich streets of Connecticut, where inventing financial instruments that no one could understand was a growth industry until last year.

So let's compare the bonuses showered on folks who work in air conditioned offices and live in bay-windowed mansions in Fairfield, Conn., with combat medics and corpsmen who risk their lives to save others at a base pay that ranges from just more than $2,000 to just less than $3,000 and who were honored at the Armed Forces YMCA "Angles of the Battlefield" ceremony this month:

-- Army Staff Sgt. Christopher Walters, a medic who pulled three comrades out of a burning Bradley Fighting Vehicle hit by an improvised explosive device in April 2008.

-- Navy Hospitalman 2 Michael Ryals, who was wounded while on patrol in Iraq in October 2006, but despite his wounds cared first for his wounded buddies.

-- Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Matthew Lavoie, who was also wounded in an IED attack, and the recipient of enough medals to provide brass door knockers on an entire street in Fairfield.

Maybe the AIG "Masters of the Universe" would like to share their bonuses with these docs.