Well, well, well, Lehman is thrown to the wolves, but AIG gets a government bailout (do I need to point out that again taxpayer money is used to salvage a private company with no public or Congressional input at all? Another step on the road to serfdom).
Obviously the powers that be felt that they were a "systemic risk" to the financial system. Which in a way is funny because all of their actions so far in committing literally trillions of dollars to "save" the banking system have done little but kick the can further down the road. They tried this before in France and it was a total failure. The day of reckoning was moved further down the road, but when it came it was only worse.
All of this only proves what these guys say, which is that if you are going to make risky bets, make sure you don't make mediocre risky bets, make sure you make bets that will bring down the financial system, so that when they fail, the government will bail you out. Lehman's problem wasn't that they made risky and foolish bets; its problem was that they weren't risky enough and foolish enough, which is the lesson from AIG and Bear Stearns.
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