It's Just About Money

Now she's starting to bore me. The foolishness and the distortions are repetitive. She needs to find some new insults or we, her intended targets, may fall asleep.

Because of the increasing boredom caused by Coulter columns, I have decided to provide a new service. For the busy corporate executive or the dad with 3 kids on his hands: Speed Coulter! Her entire column, but in far fewer words. Here goes…

Title: It's Just About Money
Bad liberals (Woody Allen joke).
Bad media, picking on Bush and Cheney.
Bad media, bad, bad.
Bush and Cheney good business men, did no bad.
Misquote "girly-girl" New York Times to prove Bush Cheney did no bad.
It's all Clinton's fault.

Now if you still feel the need to read more, here it is:"

It's Just About Money
by Ann Coulter
July 25, 2002

LIBERAL'S COMPREHENSION of corporate scandals is like the Woody Allen joke about what he knew about "War and Peace" after taking a speed-reading course and reading it in 20 minutes: "It involves Russia."

Once again, all evil is laid at the door of those demonic liberals. Although it is odd to quote very liberal Woody Allen while attacking liberals. Also there's that bad apostrophe (bad apostrophe, bad, bad) in "liberal's," but let's not be too picky.

George Bush and Dick Cheney's involvement in corporate corruption consists primarily of the media's capacity to mention their names in the same sentence as "corporate corruption" 1 million times a day. Liberals think their capacity to say someone's name in an accusatory tone of voice is sufficient to impute criminality to Republicans. Since Republicans are intrinsically evil, merely mentioning their names suffices to make any point liberals want to make. Bush and Cheney have bought and sold stock. The swine!

First, there is slightly more to the Bush/Cheney connection than Coulter makes out, but more about that later. The crack about "accusatory tone of voice" is funny coming from Coulter, given her method of attacking the demon liberals is simply to call them nasty names over and over, which "suffices to make any point" Ann Coulter "wants to make."

Whenever the media start intoning darkly about "perceptions," "the full details," "unanswered questions," and--most pathetic--"the shadow of Enron"--you should smell a big, fat commie rat (Gen. Buck Turgidson, "Dr. Strangelove").

War III. Just the sort of people Coulter admires. The subtitle of the movie is How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and last week we gave you a quote from Coulter hero Phylis Schlafly, who said that nuclear weapons were "a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God." Strangelove = Schlafly love.

In fact, there are no "unanswered questions" about Bush and Cheney. There are only insipid insinuations.

The facts are: Bush sold his stock in Harken to purchase the Texas Rangers. The price of the stock later went down. (And then it went up to more than what he sold it for.) Amid hectoring from liberals that he do so, Cheney sold his interest in Halliburton before becoming vice president to eliminate the possibility of a conflict of interest. Later, the price of that stock went down--in large part due to trial lawyers filing asbestos suits against Halliburton.

It's not illegal to own or sell stock. It's illegal to sell stock based on insider information.

True, but there is more to it than this. Briefly, Bush used sweetheart loans as an executive at Harken to buy Harken stock. (He has recently called for "an end to all company loans to corporate officers." Can you say, "Hypocrisy"?) Later, he was allowed to sell much of his Harken stock even though it had been used as collateral for those same loans. The company gave him permission to do so; no reason has been offered for why he got this special dispensation. The sale of Harken stock allowed Bush to buy into the Texas Rangers.

Also, Harken used dubious accounting procedures to artificially inflate profits (which helped its stock price) while Bush was one of its directors. Then there is the fact that even though Bush violated S.E.C. procedures, there was no serious investigation into his actions. This might have something to do with the fact that his father had appointed the S.E.C. chairman and that the S.E.C.'s general counsel (the one who usually decides about legal action) had previously been Bush's own personal lawyer. I'm not kidding. Finally, there are many questions about his Rangers purchase, including the use of public money to build a stadium which benefitted Rangers owners, including Bush. At the very least, all this smacks of excessive cronyism and disregard for taxpayers' interests. It may not be illegal, but it's not purty neither.

As for Cheney, he was actually C.E.O. of Halliburton when his company engaged in the same kind of WorldCom and Enron (and Harken) accounting procedures which artificially inflated Halliburton's stock value. This artificial value inflation allowed Cheney to sell at a nice profit. Later the true economic situation of the company was revealed and the stock price dropped. Again: legal, maybe; slimy, just possibly.

Thus, the Democrats' theory must be that Bush's purchase of the Texas Rangers and Cheney's ascension to the vice presidency were wily scams to conceal their real reason for selling assets: insider information! Of this, there is no evidence. Literally no evidence, in contradistinction to when liberals say there is "no evidence," meaning there hasn't been a conviction in a court of law, but there are boatloads of evidence.

As I've very briefly outlined above, this is nonsense. First, we're not talking primarily about insider trading--although that may bear investigation--it's a question of ethical business behavior. And there is loads of evidence of business malpractice and favoritism. Furthermore, it's not just Democrats who have questions about this administration. For example, Republican writer Kevin Phillips penned an article in the Los Angeles Times (Feb 10, 2002) which traced the incestuous ties between Enron and the Bush dynasty.

The imputation of criminality to Bush and Cheney is so ludicrous that even in the girly-girly, eye-poking attacks on the New York Times op-ed page it has been roundly admitted that there is no question of "any criminality" (Frank Rich) and that "Mr. Bush broke no laws" (Nicholas Kristof). Rep. Barney Frank, the only honest Democrat, has repeatedly said that it is "not a case of Dick Cheney violating the law."

"Girly-girly"? So, Coulter, being a girl is bad? This "girly-boy" and "girly-girl" name calling--which Coulter uses repeatedly--belongs in the schoolyard; it may be vaguely cute once, but it is getting old very fast. As for the quotes, they are all taken horribly out of context, from articles which, while not accusing Bush/Cheney of criminality, do indict them for participating in some very shady business operations. Or as Kristof put it in the article Coulter quotes from: "It's a sordid tale of cronyism, of misuse of power, of cozy backroom money-grubbing -- a more pressing threat to American business than outright criminality."

Thus, the media explain their baseless sneering about the president and vice president as attempts to "add to our knowledge of the ethics, policies and personnel of a secretive administration," as Rich put it.

It's a little late for liberals to pretend they care about ethics in the White House or anyplace else. These are the people who vehemently--angrily--defended a president who perjured himself, hid evidence, suborned perjury, was held in contempt by a federal court, was disbarred by the Supreme Court, lied to his party, his staff, his wife and the nation. The ethics of that president included having staff perform oral sex on him in the Oval Office as he chatted on the phone with a congressman about sending American troops into battle.

Sigh. When we erase the part of Coulter's brain containing "girly-girl" and "girly-boy," can we take the Clinton repeat loop with it? Most liberals I know agree that Clinton had sleazy personal ethics. They simply don't think that lying about sex is enough to get you impeached. Would we want our daughters to hang out with him? No way. But we also don't want to see Presidents tossed from office because they like blow-jobs. This does not translate into a lack of care about ethics. Coulter is saying, because liberals liked Clinton (which isn't true), we don't need to listen to anything they say about Bush.

The secular saints of liberalism indignantly defended all this on the grounds that it's fine to lie and commit crimes if it's "just about sex." Evidently some corporate officials took that lesson to heart and concluded that it's also fine to commit crimes if it's "just about money."

The difference, of course, is that sex is between two consenting parties who both, we hope, are having a good time. Stealing money is about one party picking the pocket of another party: only one of them gets any fun out of that transaction. Cheating on your wife is not the same as stealing millions of dollars.

Just as Ronald Reagan gave American culture a renewed patriotism and self-confidence that outlasted his presidency, Clinton has bequeathed America a culture of criminality and rationalization by the powerful.

Again, the big lie. Clinton has sex and lied about it so Enron and WorldCom felt it was ok to fix their books? This is insane. I can just see the Enron boardroom: "Well fellow board members, we could fake all these phony transactions to make us look richer than we are and inflate our stock options, but that would be wrong." "But what about Clinton? He got a blow-job and lied about it." "Good point, let's pump the stock and screw the shareholders. If Clinton says it's ok, then it's ok in my book. God bless our philandering president!" Yet this is exactly what Coulter is suggesting happened. The rest of this is so silly I can't comment further. Read on and try not to choke on your corn chips...

But still somehow, Republicans are said to be more vulnerable whenever a businessman becomes a crook on the basis of their general support of capitalism. But if criminality and not capitalism is to blame, then Democrats are to blame for their general support of crooks.

As part of the left's long-standing fanatical defense of their favorite criminal, Bill Clinton, it will be screeched that conservatives want to blame everything on Clinton, including the wacky idea that a direct assault on honor and honesty led some people to behave dishonorably and dishonestly.

Not everything. But some of us called this ball and this pocket years ago:

"If Congress doesn't have the will to throw him out, Clinton will have set a new standard for the entire country. The new standard will be a total absence of standards. ... If you get caught and don't have a good enough legal team to escape, you might have to pay a fine or go to prison. But there's no shame in it. The country doesn't really condemn this. We adore a lovable rogue. ... (I)t is fine to lie and cheat and manipulate because honor is just a word, just hot air and the country doesn't believe in it." ("High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton," 1998.)

It took a bear market to inexorably repeal the Clintonian national motto of "Just Do It!"

©2002 Carl Skutsch. All rights reserved.
All opinions expressed herein are those of the author unless otherwise noted
(and it goes without saying that they make more sense than Coulter's opinions.)

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