The best part was when it turned out Cheney had appeared in a promotional video for none other than disgraced Enron accountants, Arthur Andersen. In the video he explains how the accounting firm helped during his time as CEO of Halliburton. “I get good advice, if you will, from their people,” he says, “over and above the normal, by-the-books auditing arrangement.” Wow, we couldn’t have put it better ourselves…
CONCLUSION

As extensive as it might seem, this article only touches on a few of the illegal things Enron did. Information is still coming out about how they cheated the taxman, how they bribed government officials in a number of countries, how they worked with other firms to manipulate prices during the California crisis, etc. Also, this article doesn’t cover half the questionable business dealings Bush partook in before becoming Texas Governor.
But whatever the details or the yet-to-be-discovered full extent of this are, what’s certain is that a whole lot of people, mostly innocent employees and retirees, suffered a lot in order to enrich the already-rich few. Obviously, it’s not like this was all directly ordered by Bush and Cheney. But they certainly were not bystanders either: they were involved in much of it while in office, before assuming office, and wouldn’t have won office if it weren’t for Enron’s and their own dirty money. They’ve also been shown to use similar debt-hiding tricks in their accounting of how much their massive tax cuts for the rich will cost taxpayers.
Again, if the Republicans managed to turn a few blowjobs into grounds for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, certainly the Democrats can find something in these scandals with which to impeach Bush and Cheney. Given that Clinton’s blowjobs directly hurt only his wife and daughter, but these scandals hurt millions of Americans, it should only be a matter of time before this administration pays a political, if not legal, price for its involvement in them.
Alas, I must conclude that this may not end up coming to pass. I base this on my own experiences hanging out with former Enron employees at a conference recently, which I attended as part of my day job (no, not as editor of Fish Piss.) Although everyone I spoke to (about 25 former Enron people) were convinced Enron’s executives should rot in jail for the rest of their lives, most gave me blank stares when I mentioned that maybe Bush and Cheney should, too. A brief silence was followed by their strong assertions of support for Bush—“I’m all for him”- “Well I voted for him” - “He’s a plain talker and I believe him, not like that Slick Willie” - and one of them even said he thought Bush should nuke Iraq already “before they nuke us.” Suddenly, I believed those polls I’d read in U.S. newspapers which came across like propaganda for the war effort, saying that 90% of Americans are behind Bush all the way. My god, I thought, if even former Enron employees are blaming Clinton for Enron more than they’re blaming Bush, what is the world in for? Bush must think he can get away with anything!
I did, at least, find one former Enron employee who admitted, after lowering his voice so the others couldn’t hear, that he didn’t like what Bush was doing. In hushed tones he told me that “Bush thinks that might is right—and that’s wrong.” But the mere fact that criticism of Bush felt, for him and for me, like a palpably dangerous thing to do—a feeling I’ve never felt anywhere, but which I suspect is the norm in police states or dictatorships—does not bode well for the cause of truth, dissent, or justice in America or in the world. However, my fingers are crossed that if the lawsuit against Cheney reveals what he and Bush seem so desperate to hide, that Americans will finally understand what their current leaders really are– unscrupulous champions of big oil and of big money, and not of the people. Hopefully at that point, real justice will be done.

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