"Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while, Till we can clear these ambiguities"

- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliette

Washington is awash with outrage over AIG dolling out $165 million in executive bonuses in the wake of the insurer receiving $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money. Everyone from President Obama to freshman congressmen vied for the Most Outraged Politician award which, by the end of last week, was won outright by Iowa Senator Charles Grassley who actually said the AIG executives have but two options, "Resign, or go and commit suicide." AIG executive bonuses have now joined the Defense Department's $800 toilet seat, the Reagan era Cadillac-driving welfare mother, and, most recently, the Alaskan bridge-to-nowhere in the Political Outrage Hall of Fame.

To be clear, genuine outrage has its place. Taxation Without Representation? A Tea Party doesn't seem over the top. Citizens picketing the mayor's office over drug-peddlers conducting their business in a local school playground? By all means, be outraged.

But the trouble with outrage is it's typically a surrogate for another grievance that people don't understand and can't articulate. The banking-mortgage-market crash is a complex, amorphous mish-mash of avarice, irresponsibility and stupidity. It isn't easily reduced to a 15-second soundbite. However, the public instantly grasps the specter of Wall Street wheeler-dealers stuffing their pin-striped pants with hard-earned taxpayer cash. Lynch mobs aren't inventive in their targets. They exploit the despised or wounded, not the true sources of their problems.

There is also the generalized societal outrage that ebbs and flows with the times. Today, there is a systemic angst across the land that comes with seeing one's life savings washed away by one rogue wave. The economic well-being of the people I talk to ranges from resigned depression to outright panic. The laws of physics suggest that all of this negative emotion has got to land somewhere. The same politicians who, in part, are responsible for "the problem" saw an opportunity to divert the outrage elsewhere—and now it's backfired on them. Instead of calming the mob, they fed it.

They should be more careful. When Howard Beale (Peter Lynch) in the movie "Network" galvanized a nation with his rant, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take anymore!" his targets of outrage were scatter-shot and included: inflation, failing banks, "punks running wild in the streets," the Russians, air pollution, unsafe food, insipid television, and a gnawing cultural malaise. But his most telling complaint was "there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it."

Which begs the question: Are people truly outraged over executive bonuses or is that merely a symptom of their present disgust with Washington's response to the economic crisis? My suspicion is they are angrier at Washington than Washington realizes. To the extent there is an antidote to this outrage it consists of those rare qualities of political courage, leadership and something constructive for the enraged mob to do. With those in short supply, expect the mob to grow and come after bigger game than a faceless set of insurance executives.