Speaking of scandal-ridden stories: At the aforementioned memorial service, I fell into a conversation with comedians and comedy writers about the whole Enron saga — a chat that was interesting because it was utterly non-partisan and not even about whether laws were broken. It was about whether the Bush Administration has mismanaged things with regard to allowing the scandal to become a topic for comic fodder. The unanimous consensus was that they have.
Everyone in government does dumb things but some do not gain eternal life by becoming punch-lines and some do. "I never inhaled" was not the least ingenuous thing a presidential candidate every said…not even the least candid thing Bill Clinton said that year. But it became monologue legend, whereas Ronald Reagan, claiming that scenes from war movies had actually happened, did not. George W. Bush mispronouncing "subliminal" is eternally enshrined, whereas dozens of verbal gaffes by all candidates are not. (Anyone remember Paul Tsongas getting his wife's name wrong? I didn't think so. For that matter, anyone remember Paul Tsongas? But his misidentification of Mrs. Tsongas somehow didn't inspire comedy, even during that week Americans knew who he was.)
Dick Cheney being eternally in an "undisclosed location" and/or having weekly heart attacks is funny. So is Bush fainting from eating a pretzel. So is Bush's sidestep from "Kenny Boy" to "Who is Kenneth Lay?" It isn't that these are scandals; just that they end the honeymoon and wound Bush's ability to claim that his administration is any different from the preceding one. Has any president in our memory not had a couple of close friends who got mixed up in crooked money deals? Has any administration not had to stonewall over some Congressional inquiry and then give in and tell all? Neil Bush even shows signs of surfacing and carrying on in the grand tradition of Billy Carter, Roger Clinton and other embarrassing presidential brothers.
The Enron scandal may or may not lead to actual charges of illegal action within the Bush administration. That will hinge on smoking guns, if any, yet to be found and perhaps on whether it was the first of many to plunge. (Anyone taken a look lately at the stock price of Cheney's beloved Halliburton Industries? Makes K-Mart look like a hot ticket.) But it has certainly helped us to fill out the full complement of running gags about the Bush-Cheney White House. Some things just don't change.