Posted on 07/13/2002 4:37:51 PM PDT by Pokey78
I was interested to read last week of Ulf Buck, a blind German psychic who claims to be able to predict the future by feeling people's naked buttocks. That's more or less what the American press and their chums in the Democratic Party are trying to do.
No sooner does the bottom drop out of WorldCom or ImClone than the press psychics insist they can detect in its dimples and crevices all sorts of gloomy portents for George W Bush's political future. Somehow these collapsing corporate posteriors are supposed to be connected to the President, and indeed his responsibility: the butt stops here.
Some readers may recall what I said in these pages the week the Enron scandal broke. Other readers will have difficulty recalling Enron at all. C'mon, you must remember, it was a H-U-G-E Presidency-detonating scandal just six months ago, back when CNN's graphics department were dusting off everyone's favourite suffix and running up little "ENRONGATE" logos, and the New York Times was assuring us that "questions were being raised". As I wrote in January: "The only 'question' really being 'raised' is: How can we pin this on Bush? Short answer: You can't."
And so it proved. And what went then goes triple this time round. Enron was comparatively easy: it was an energy company, from Texas, whose rise had coincided (more or less) with Bush's governorship. Connect the dots, implied the Dems, and what you have here is the worst example of the Texas wildcattin' business culture from which this oil stooge President emerged.
But they couldn't make it stick. And the terrain is far less favourable in the current crop of scandals. For one thing, it's not a shady energy company, but a diverse portfolio - telecommunications, biotech, pharmaceuticals, and even Christmas spice balls and cockscomb topiary (among the fallen corporate idols is America's happy homemaker Martha Stewart, supposedly being investigated for insider dealing - or, as she would say, "Here's a stock deal I made earlier").
So suddenly you're not attacking energy and polluters and Big Oil and Texans but just business in general. And, while Ralph Nader and other cheerily unreconstructed workers' champions may be happy to do that, that puts the Democratic Party a little bit further to the Left of where they want to be come election day this November. Of course, if you wanted to fine-tune the attacks not to sound like you're totally anti-business, you could blame Martha, Enron and the rest on Nineties boom culture, but, given that Bill Clinton spent eight years taking credit for that, it's hard to see why it's now Bush's fault.
So Bush critics have instead dragged up a low-interest loan the President got from some oil company he was a director of over a decade ago. "President Bush likes to preach responsibility," said the Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe. "When it comes to his own records, the motto is: 'The buck stops over there'."
"It is hard to lead when you haven't done the things that you're asking others to do," tutted Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic leader. This is the same Terry McAuliffe who founded the Federal City Bank, which was deemed by regulators to be using unsound banking practices and which, while Mr McAuliffe was also serving as finance director for the 1988 Presidential campaign of one Dick Gephardt, gave said Gephardt an "unusual and unsecured" loan for $125,000.
So, if the low-interest loan won't jump, the only outrageous Bush-toppling scandal left in play is the fact that in 1990 Harken Energy Corp was a few months late filing a routine letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission confirming that Mr Bush had divested some stock and was blah-blah-blah . . . growing drowsy . . . zzzzzzzz . . . impenetrable technical violation . . . losing the will to type.
Oh, pardon me, I dozed off in the middle of the sentence. For the last three readers who haven't skipped ahead to the the books section, the danger for the Democrats here is in over-reaching. By the end of the week, the ethics bores were whipped up over the SEC's latest investigation - into Bristol-Myers Squibb for practices that "inflated sales by $1 billion".
What this boils down to is: Their sales guys went around saying hey, you should buy our products now because they'll be going up next year. According to the New York Daily News, "critics charge the company knew the resulting, incentive-driven sales exceeded demand but encouraged the stockpiling anyway as a way to meet profit projections." "Bristol-Myers may be forced to restate its revenues," said Steven Tighe, a drug analyst at Merrill Lynch. What for? No one is suggesting they didn't sell the stuff. Actual product changed hands: the customers have the drugs; the drug company has the money. In what sense is this "inflating" sales? Talk about a damp Squibb.
More to the point, it's exactly what my local post office (proprietor: the United States government) did to me a few months back. Quite out of the blue, my postmaster, Mike, suggested that I renew my bulk mail permit three months early as the rates would be going up on July 1. Was the US Postal Service thus "inflating" sales? Who cares? Arthur Andersen is a model of rectitude compared to what passes for auditing in your average Federal department, especially the "sensitive" ones (Office of Civil Rights, Bureau of Indian Affairs, etc).
No accountability? Missing billions? Meaningless annual reports? Pick any Federal agency you like. WorldCom's $4 billion is less than one sixtieth of the new US $248 billion farm subsidy bill, three-quarters of which goes to a bunch of multimillionaire play-farmers like Ted Turner and David Rockefeller. Take any G8 member. Okay, let's exclude Russia, and Italy, and stick with the semi-respectables. Say what you like about Enron's Ken Lay but he's no Jacques Chirac. In Canada last week, the Liberal Government more or less admitted giving millions of taxpayer dollars to advertising agencies which never made any actual advertisements but instead were grateful enough to give some of the money back - not to the taxpayers, but to the Liberal Party. The great thing about government money laundering is you don't even need to go to the trouble of opening an offshore account in Bermuda. At least, the market is always, eventually, self-correcting. Given the choice between government scrutiny of business or business scrutiny of government, I know what I'd opt for.
But the media must be allowed their fun. On Wednesday, Judicial Watch launched a suit against Dick Cheney, the Vice President, over past business practices. Judicial Watch, according to the BBC News, is an "anti-corruption group". "Anti-corruption": how noble! A couple of years ago, when Judicial Watch were suing Bill Clinton every other week, the BBC described them only as "a Right-wing lobby group" and the US media, when they mentioned them at all, did so only to dismiss them as a bunch of crazies.
Enjoy it while you can, boys. Sometime in the next two months President Bush will be invading Iraq. After that, any Democrat who wants to fight an election on "It's the accountancy, stupid" would be advised to re-think.
Let's leave the name calling to the DemocRATS!
No sooner does the bottom drop out . . .
Sorry, it's late, and I've been up since 5:30 a.m., but I laughed so hard that I'll have to finish this EXCELLENT post tomorrow!
LOL, LOL
For Mark Steyn? Anytime! =^)
I'd pull up a chair right beside you. LOL
TV can be educational....at times. : )
Thanks, King.
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