Yeah, booyah to you, pal!

Thanks to the publicity over retreats at expensive California spas and partridge hunts in the English countryside, American International Group has become a big fat target for critics.

But its new chief executive Edward Liddy, the former Allstate C.E.O. and Goldman Sachs director, has drawn a line in the sand. Heidi Moore of the Wall Street Journal’s Deal Journal reports that Liddy has sent an angry letter to Jim Cramer, saying that he went too far by urging viewers of his Mad Money show on Thursday to "harass" A.I.G. employees.

Cramer said on the show about A.I.G.:

"We should hound them in the supermarket, we should hound them in the ballpark, we should hound them everywhere they are. We should make fun of them, and we should point fingers at them, and we should tell them that you have no shame."

Liddy has demanded an apology, saying, "It is one thing to criticize the executive leadership of A.I.G.—that's fair commentary. But it is way out of bounds to incite people to confront and harass other A.I.G. employees."

A.I.G. employees, he says, "did not cause this mess, but they are paying for it—in diminished 401(k) savings and in some job losses as we sell companies to repay the Federal loan."

On Monday night's show, Cramer apologized, more or less, the Business Sheet reports: 

"Last week, I was talking about the old management at A.I.G. and how they should be hounded," Cramer said. "It made it sound like I want to hound everybody at AIG. No. Thousands—99.9 percent of people who work at AIG are fabulous, including most of my neighbors. It was the old guys who did this stuff."

On last week's show, Cramer was indeed sharply critical of the old guyss, and the way A.I.G. doled out money for retreats and executive bonuses even as it sought nearly $123 billion in federal loans.

And he noted that there could be a day of reckoning for the company today, when the credit-default swaps on hundreds of billions of Lehman Brothers debt will be settled.

Cramer has been in an apologizing mood of late, issuing mea culpas for bullish calls on Bear Stearns and Wachovia.

"I apologized to my viewers," he told David Carr of the New York Times. "I apologized on the Today show. It is a completely humbling market."