BEWARE, you Enron fanatics and conspiracy theorists. Let me warn you: This way lies madness.
My Tuesday column pronouncing the Enron scandal dead as a political issue (if very much alive as a financial issue) drew a barrage of e-mails from thoughtful and intelligent people driven to near-incoherence by rage and frustration. They so want President Bush and the Republican Party damaged that they allowed hope into their partisan hearts, and they are deeply disappointed.
There was self-evidently no conspiracy to save Enron: The Bush administration did not intervene in any way as the company was collapsing. And every day brings more news about how Enron’s largess implicates Democrats and Republicans alike – particularly the Clinton administration, which did the company a major favor after a major 1996 campaign contribution. Sen. Chuck Schumer, our own liberal Democrat, was the fourth-largest recipient of Enron dollars in the Senate – and he’s no Bushite.
These inconvenient facts only make the conspiracy-minded more suspicious. One Arlington, Va., reader wrote: “Republican crooks always contribute token $$ to the Democrats, as a smokescreen, so they can shift scandals away from the GOP. . . . When the scandal breaks, they can obscure their footsteps and camouflage their chain of command.”
Then there’s what might be called the “presumption of guilt” argument: “A keen observer might wonder if the assertion that the plight of Enron was never mentioned earlier during all of those meetings by Enron with the administration is any more believable than the assertion that . . . the president choked on a pretzel.”
What’s going on here is sadly familiar. For years we’ve been hearing about how the “scandal culture” has poisoned Washington, but it would be more accurate to say that the scandal culture has poisoned the minds of ideologically and politically active people in the United States on both sides of the aisle.
And it’s done so in a very strange way. It’s probably natural (wrong, but natural) to believe that people who promulgate ideas you consider evil are themselves evil. But in the past 30 years, American partisans have reserved a special place in hell for politicians of the opposite party who actually do things they like.
Richard Nixon went to China, softened relations with the Soviet Union, invented the Environmental Protection Agency, made welfare a lifetime benefit and imposed wage-and-price controls. Nixon was a liberal’s dream Republican – and liberals hated him for it with a passion that defied reason.
Bill Clinton expanded free trade and ended the lifetime welfare benefit, shifting the Democratic Party to the center in the process. To hear professional anti-Clintonites tell it, he was a monster of unparalleled proportions.
And their propensity to throw slanderous allegations in the same pot with serious ones (the bizarre notion that he “murdered Vince Foster” along with the important fact that he committed perjury and obstruction of justice) made it impossible for those who had not prejudged the issue to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
Now Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” seems to be driving liberals mad. As the Enron story was boiling over last week, Bush was signing a bipartisan bill into law that represents the greatest federal expansion into education policy in history. He’s indicated a willingness to sign campaign-finance reform into law.
He’s stealing their issues – while remaining a proud conservative in other ways. As a result, Bush-haters can’t even bring themselves to believe that he choked on a pretzel – though wouldn’t you imagine a rational White House spin machine could have come up with a better cover story than a pretzel choking?
I have a piece of advice for my e-mail opponents that I offer in all seriousness: Be rational. The Clinton haters nearly destroyed themselves and the political movement they claimed to believe in because they became so irrational.
You want to argue against George W. Bush? Then argue. If you believe the worst because doing so makes you feel better, you run the risk of invalidating everything you do believe in.E-mail:
podhoretz@nypost.com