The Bastards

I had hoped that the President would come out and acknowledge his sorrow over the death of his good friend Ken Lay.  There is a relationship there that goes back decades.  Apparently that won't happen.  There's no transcript up yet, but according to this commenter Tony Snow just corrected a reporter looking for a comment from Bush about the death of his friend.  "I believe the President has called Ken Lay an acquaintance," said Snow, or something to that effect.

In truth, it's disgusting enough that the President has to be asked a question, through surrogates, about this.  They were good friends, but now, because he's tainted by a conviction, he won't even acknowledge him or offer condolences on his dying day.

Enron was the single largest contributor to the 2000 election campaign of George W. Bush.  But the relationship goes back much longer than that, all the way to the first President Bush.  Lay was the chair of the host committee for the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston, where George H.W. Bush was nominated for a second term.

At that time, Investor's Daily reported that "recently, Lay has turned Enron into a corporate bastion for the GOP." After the elder Bush's defeat, the Bush family switched its political ambitions to George W.'s prospects for governor, and Lay came up with the first of many contributions to that effort.

Lay's loyal support of the Bushes may have been gratitude for the decisive role that the first Bush Administration played in Enron's meteoric rise. Building on the Republican-engineered deregulation of the electricity industry that began in the 1980s, Enron got a huge boost during the first Bush Administration with passage of the 1992 Energy Act, which forced utility companies to carry Enron's electricity on their wires.

In fact, Lay publicly thanked Bush with a column in the Dallas Morning News a week before the 1992 election. Calling Bush "the energy president," Lay wrote that "just six months after George Bush became president, he directed Energy Secretary James Watkins to lead the development of a new energy strategy." That resulted in the legislation making Enron's exponential growth possible.

If there's one thing the Bushies do, it's helping their friends.  But once those friends get in hot water, they get dropped.  And nothing can change that, apparently.  Not even dropping dead of a heart attack.

The guy who was called "an acquaintance" on the day of his death was also known as "Kenny Boy," and corresponded with the President on numerous occasions while he was in the governor's office in Texas.  They wished each other well on birthdays.  They offered sympathy during each other's medical issue (like Bush's knee surgery in 1997).  And of course, they discussed business matters, like deregulating the energy market in Texas, which was a financial boon to Enron.  In 1997, Bush called Tom Ridge, then the governor of Pennsylvania, to lobby "on Lay's behalf to open that state's market to energy trading."  It was a quid-pro-quo relationship: Lay gave Bush campaign dollars, Bush gave Lay favorable legislation.

That Lay was instrumental in Bush's rise to the presidency is indisputable. Since 1993, Lay and top Enron executives donated nearly $2 million to Bush. Lay also personally donated $326,000 in soft money to the Republican Party in the three years prior to Bush's presidential bid, and he was one of the Republican "pioneers" who raised $100,000 in smaller contributions for Bush. Lay's wife donated $100,000 for inauguration festivities.

As governor, Bush did what Enron wanted, cutting taxes and deregulating utilities. The deregulation ideology, which George W. long had adopted as gospel, allowed dubious bookkeeping and other acts of chicanery that shocked Wall Street and drove a $60-billion company, seventh on the Fortune 500 list, into bankruptcy.

(incidentally, both linked articles were from Robert Scheer, who's followed this saga acutely.)

This is to say nothing of Lay's secret meetings on energy policy with Dick Cheney, and his almost becoming Energy Secretary, and his hiring former Bush I cabinet officials (like James Baker) to work at Enron, and the current Bush Administration stepping into a dispute between Enron and India to help Enron sell a power plant, and so on, and so on, and so on.

It's about as scummy a thing as you can do, to have a long and mutually beneficial friendship end, with you giving no comment on his death.  The Bush family is defined by their vaunted loyalty.  However, that loyalty must end as soon as it gets out that you might embarrass the family with your actions.  In truth, Ken Lay has been dead to the Bush clan since 2002.  

UPDATE: Here's the full transcript:

Q One other quick question. What has been the President's reaction to the death of Ken Lay?

MR. SNOW: I really haven't talked to him about it. I'll give you my own personal reaction, which is when somebody dies you leave behind those who grieve and I think they deserve our compassion. But I don't know, what do you think would be the appropriate thing to say?

Q I don't know. I don't know him. The President was his friend, not me.

MR. SNOW: No, the President has described Ken Lay as an acquaintance, and many of the President's acquaintances have passed on during his time in office. Again, I think -- it's sort of an interesting question, but not answerable by me.