SO NOW IT'S...

SO NOW IT'S SAFE. Within hours of Ken Lay's and Jeff Skilling's guilty verdicts coming down, the MSM had begun to form their inane analysis. No less a barometer of conventional wisdom than Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote:

If you want a date to mark the beginning of the end of the Bush Era in American life, you may as well make it this one: May 25, 2006. The Enron jury in Houston didn�t just put the wood to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. The jurors took a chain saw to the moral claims of the Texas-based corporate culture that had helped fuel the rise to power of President George W. Bush.

Ha! I would that it were so, but this is utter nonsense. If Enron was going to bring down the Bush presidency, it would have done so a long time ago. It was a much bigger news story a few years ago when it broke. And remember, back then Enron was Bush's largest donor throughout his political career. He still won re-election, and Enron barely even figured into the 2004 campaign. Now, several years of continued federal fiscal mismanagement later, and this unsurprising verdict is supposed to be the nail in Bush's coffin? All this really proves is the MSM's pile-on-him-when-he's-down-because-now-it's-safe-to mentality.

--Ben Adler