As today’s editorial points out, Obama wanted Chrysler’s small lenders to ignore their fiduciary obligations to their shareholders. Isn’t that what Ken Lewis just got fired for?

Liberals took their cue from the president and immediately denounced the holdouts as “vultures,” too consumed with greed to think of the national interest. But the law compels these firms to act in their shareholders’ interest. Bank of America’s Ken Lewis ignored this responsibility and paid the price. Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke all but forced Lewis to go ahead with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch even after he learned that the firm was in deep trouble. Lewis finally broke his silence this month, and Bank of America’s shareholders promptly stripped him of his chairmanship.

Also, the liberals condemning the small lenders don’t seem to be evincing too much concern for the rule of law, in stark contrast to their outrage over “retroactive immunity” for the telecoms:

There is also a double standard at work. The rule of law was extremely important to these industrial-policy Jacobins when the telecoms were in the dock for cooperating with the Bush administration’s terrorist surveillance program. They wrongly argued that the telecoms broke the law, and they weren’t impressed by arguments that the program had yielded valuable intelligence. Apparently, the law is more flexible when bending it might yield a marginally better economic outcome for an interest group that worked very hard to get the president elected. National interest, indeed.