The right is whining. Carl Limbacher and his crew complain
on
the popular NewsMax site that in the two weeks since the Harken
story went
critical, "the prestige press" (Limbacher's odd phrase, which
presumably
means he's excluding The National Enquirer) has given the affair 50
times
more coverage than it gave the Whitewater deal after the New York
Times
broke that story on March 8, 1992.
Limbacher moans that Whitewater showed up only 14 times in
the
wake of the Times story, while from June 28 to July 12 of this year,
there
have been over 700 stories on the Harken sale.
C'mon, Carl. The reason Whitewater got off to a slow start
was
because for months, no one could figure out what the New York
Times's Jeff
Gerth was writing about. Reading any Gerth story is like bicycling
through
wet sand, but in the case of Whitewater, he surpassed himself. As
readers
sank up to their armpits in the sludge of Gerth-prose, interest in
Whitewater for that electoral year flickered and died. Gerth saved
Clinton's
ass. Ultimately, Whitewater did make it into the headlines, but in
truth, it
always lacked sex appeal. There just wasn't that much meat in the
stew. Not
like Hillary's commodity trades.
Just like those trades, Harken is really easy to understand.
Guy
(the future-and-hopefully-once president) makes a bundle selling
stock in
his company, which is going belly up, acting on insider knowledge of
the
books, and also culled because his dad was in the Oval Office. Guy
forgets
to tell the SEC.
Same way with Cheney. No need to put in those daunting
phrases
like "complex transactions." The simple numbers suffice, starting
with his
2000 severance of $36,086,635. But if anyone can save Bush and
Cheney, it
will be Gerth. Last week, he and another Times scrivener called
Richard
Stevenson managed the truly amazing feat of making the Harken story
complicated and boring.
Here was the first paragraph: "President Bush received
two
low-interest loans to buy stock from an oil company where he served
as a
board member in the late 1980's. He then benefited from the company's
relaxation of the terms of one loan in 1989 as he was engaged in the
most
important business deal of his career."
Only 52 words and already the air is whistling out of the
tire.
On and on the story trundled, as though written by someone who'd
learned
English late in life by reading insurance settlements.
Harken is not a new story. Charles Lewis of the Center
for
Public Integrity dealt with it long ago in his book "The Buying of
the
President 2000." Even back then, Lewis speculated that the mystery
institutional buyer of Bush's stock might have been Harvard
Management --
the overseer of the school's multi-billion dollar endowment. which
lost
staggering amounts in a bum investment that saved the ass of the
president's
son.
A few days later, Gerth and Don van Natta Jr, were at it
again,
this time paralyzing Times readers with a narcotic narrative about
Halliburton.
Reading the story was a bit like walking around some
familiar
room in the dark, tripping over and then gradually recognizing bits
of
furniture. Through the choking fog of Gerth-prose one could dimly
descry the
familiar landscape of Pentagon corruption, with cost-plus bids,
non-competitive contract awards, manic over-billing and so forth.
Senator
Charles Grassley's staff will be only too glad to send you thousands
of
pages of testimony on such endemic corruption and fraud, a goodly
part of
which stemmed from Al Gore's efforts to reinvent government by having
recourse to the discipline and efficiency (heh heh) of the private
sector.
Another reason for the sense of familiarity was that the
story
was broken, and, furthermore, told in an exciting and accessible way
several
months ago by Jordan Green of the Institute for Southern Studies,
published
in Facing South, the institute's Internet newsletter, with a shorter
version
in the Institute's Southern Exposure magazine. Contrast Gerth-tedium
with
Green's pioneering and far richer treatment, under the title "To the
Victors
Go the Markets: Halliburton's Claim On Central Asia."
But even the Gerth treatment may not save Cheney, who's gone
to
ground again, just as he did after 9/11, though this time, the enemy
will
take the form of a subpoena-server rather than the shock troops of
al Qaeda.
If Cheney totters into that good night, may we not expect
to
hear the call for a hero of NYC's darkest hour, the former mayor,
Mr. Rudy
Giuliani, a man whose marital upheavals have now been settled with a
handsome payoff to the injured wife and the charges of abominable
cruelties
sealed forever. Vice President Giuliani. How does that sound?
Terrifying? Of course, because Giuliani's anti-civil
libertarian
instincts would mesh in perfectly with the totalitarian propensities
of the
Bush regime. But as the public temper sharpens against the corporate
culture
that saw Cheney haul off $36 million from Halliburton in 2000,
Giuliani's
famous prosecutorial forays against Wall Street figures in the 1980s
offer a
resume in sync with the new mood.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of
the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn
and read
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate
Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
