Okay, first off, I want to point out how much the Enron logo resembles the Mad Poiuyt, an optical illusion featured many years ago on the cover of MAD Magazine. You can draw your own connection in terms of both creating the illusion of something where nothing exists…or an impossible puzzle…or something like that. Secondly, I want to say that I'm still standing behind my prediction that George W. Bush will escape from this, relatively unscathed…but I feel a bit less sure of that prediction than I did when I posted it. The press and pundits, for whatever reason, suddenly seem to be pouncing on this one in a way that suggests that they won't let it go. In a sense, it's already hurt Bush in that this and the pretzel incident have declared that it's once again okay to ridicule our current Chief Exec.
(How long before someone floats the question that the pretzel story was a contrived cover story to mask that Bush injured himself because he's drinking or doing heavy drugs? If and when those jokes start, they'll be like Clinton dick references. We'll never hear the end of them.)
A couple of articles have made me rethink this thing a bit, most notably those that suggest that Dick Cheney is being hidden (and is still stonewalling about his energy task force) because he's more enmeshed in Enron skullduggery than is currently known. Naturally, this is just the rumor mill at work but lately, scandal-connected rumors have a way of becoming impervious to disproval. There are still plenty of folks who are certain that Vince Foster was killed, that Hillary's using FBI files to blackmail her enemies, etc. When Bush defenders say that no one can prove he or his close associates did anything wrong…well, that may be so. I suspect it's so. I also think the Clintons, Gore and others were injured by a lot of allegations that were unproven or were even disproven.
It may also be that the scandal of Enron will be that all the sleazy things that were done weren't illegal; that the company bought the necessary regulatory changes to allow a lot of practices that clearly should have been illegal. This viewpoint is convincingly discussed in an article Scott Rosenberg wrote for Salon. Most of it's in their "subscriber only" section but the Smirking Chimp website has reposted the whole thing where you can read it for free. Here's the link. This is the piece that has most caused me to think maybe this thing won't go away for a while.