Randy asked: > You mean, if our president has a criminal past, why should we > make an issue of it?
You are assuming or wishing he has a criminal past as your premise out the gate. If indeed he did, he never ever would have gotten as far as he has in any venture of his life. You know that his political opponents would have found it out and screamed it from the rooftops years ago. I guess this ties in because he political opponents were the ones who were ranting about the deal with Harken way back when. There was a full and extensive investigation and he was found to have committed no wrongdoing, much less anything criminal. I actually looked around quite a bot to find a current news article which could explain the history of this Harken issue objectively and without political bias and found one at National Review online (yes it is conservative but also known for being objective and tediously factual to the point of boredom). If you are interested here is the link http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york071002.asp It may be a difficult read because it is not written in quick, hyperbolic sound bite style but rather is almost like a legal brief, which I admit I even had a hard time getting through. However, If you are really interested in the facts you might pore through it. The conncluding statement of the article is arguably biased "Even so, it's probably safe to expect the president's opponents to keep hammering away on the Harken issue. Just because it's never worked before doesn't mean they'll stop trying." Or one might say it is just commonly observable fact. > I don't see Enron as some abberation, I see it as the > tip of the iceberg. They just got caught, that's all. They were > conducting business as usual. Of course it is not some aberration - such situations have been going on in one form or another since the beginning of time. Greed is timeless. What is preposterous is to somehow try to link it to Bush. The shady dealings that set up the Enron debacle took place during the prior administration as everyone knows. Where was the prior administrations Justice Dept. and SEC during that time? It was laughable that the political opponents who rushed to try to slime Bush with Enron were suddenly silent after it was revealed through public records that they themselves owned thousands of dollars in Enron stock and had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from Enron. The gall and venality of those who try to foist this junk on public opinion is so transparent to most people. These are the same opponents who gave Clinton a pass on everything, even while he was brazenly violating several laws right in front of our faces. Setting aside the perjury offense let's take one example of many - Clinton and Gore openly getting millions of dollars in campaign money from Chinese government representatives (in exchange for what?). Maybe many don't know this but that is a federal offense. I once worked on a case defending a Korean national who the feds were ready to send to prison because he gave a couple hundred dollars to a Korean-American candidate running in a local election in California.. >Enron executives won't go to jail. They'll get to keep their money. It's way too early to assume that. You should rather be hoping that they do pay and perhaps writing those in government expressing your opinion. > A guy robbing a liquor store will have to pay for his crime (as he/she should). A guy robbing a corporation should get 20 times the sentence as the guy robbing a liquor store. On that I'm sure we both agree. I do believe Bush's "get tough" speech and that it is more than just words. In the past the Justice Dept. and SEC and other various government agencies DID relentlessly prosecute such cases. The laws have been there for years but for some reason the responsible government agencies were apparently asleep at the wheel or in some kind of disconnect in the 1990s. As were our intelligence and immigration agencies. Kakki
