November 9, 2004
IN THESE GUYS HOPE IS A HALLIBURTON:
Halliburton, the Second-Term Curse? (Dana Milbank, November 9, 2004, Washington Post)
The White House's Halliburton Honeymoon is already history.Only two days after President Bush declared victory in his quest for a second term, the company once run by Vice President Cheney dropped a political bomb.
In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, the oil services company said that the Justice Department expanded its investigation into Halliburton, that government probes have found that bribes may have been made in Nigeria and that A. Jack Stanley, a former senior executive, may have been involved.
The latest news about alleged shenanigans at Halliburton, some of which may have occurred on Cheney's watch, serves as a timely warning for the Bush administration: Second terms are often beset by scandal. President Bill Clinton was impeached in the Monica S. Lewinsky affair. President Ronald Reagan endured the Iran-contra scandal. And President Richard M. Nixon had Watergate.
Assume for a moment that there's a soul on the planet who cares about bribed Nigerians, now try tying this back to George Bush. It's a complete non-story that only goes to show how remarkably scandal free this Administration has been. Who was the last President to not have a cabinet member or senior staffer forced to resign? Buchanan maybe? Posted by Orrin Judd at November 9, 2004 8:18 PM
If we didn't like our (relatively) cheap oil so much, we might actually find the time to be outraged at the bribes and such we've watched MNCs give to so many third world "governments" and dictators and such for access to their oil, and only rarely benefitting their peoples.
Halliburton's the tip of the iceberg. But nobody cares. In so many of these places, it's a cost of doing business. Indeed, you can just about measure a nation's geological prospectivity by their (bad) score with Transparency International.
So it goes.
Posted by: kevin whited at November 9, 2004 8:36 PMI don't expect any scandals or problems (especially after the MSM turned over every rock and even invented some rocks to go after Bush with) but with 4 more years something might pop up.
Posted by: AWW at November 9, 2004 8:37 PMDana needs to get a new beat. He's got to be dying that all his best efforts to oust Bush were ignored.
Posted by: Melissa at November 9, 2004 9:16 PMGee, here's a great Democratic strategy -- force Dick Cheney out due to some Halliburton scandal so Bush can name Condi Rice, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Bill Frist, etc. as his new vice-president and give that person a major leg up in the 2008 campaign, instead of having to run with everyone else as an equal in an open primary. Wile E. Coyote comes up with better plans.
Posted by: John at November 9, 2004 10:19 PMUnlike those other 2nd term scandals, the Congress and President are of the same party (at least for two more years). He doesn't mention Iran-Contra, but it fits, too.
But after years of listening to the press trying to peddle scandal stories from Enron to Halliburton to the National Guard, no one is going to get worked up without a Congressional investigation. Dana Milbank is just another Dan Rather, and tainted by the laters partisanship, and needs to learn to deal with that fact.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at November 10, 2004 12:05 AMMillbank has been an anti-Bush addict for sometime. He can't help it, he needs his fix.
Terrible, isn't it, when you discount what the article says just by looking at the by-line?