While just how Enron was looted baffles first sight, a criminal spine to Enron scandals is both clear and familiar to the people: a thief (Mr. Lay) gives much cash to a politician (Bush); thereafter, the thief enjoys great favor and wealth as the politician rises to greater power still. That is a clear fact of the circumstance everybody understands, and therefore none can successfully hide.
Republican electoral success depends on great financial predominance. The willingness of rich rightists to donate large sums to Bush is a principal weapon in the enemys armory. The exigencies of wartime politics have already acted to reduce his fundraising capabilities somewhat, by rendering unseemly any aggressively partisan activity by a purportedly national leader (as Bush claims himself to be).
By political action emphasizing Mr. Lays great investments in Bush, as well as the clear favor Mr. Lay enjoyed, Bushs ability to raise party funds can be reduced still further.
Any number of Bushs "Pioneer" bag-men will be discovered still active, tainted by connections to Mr. Lay, and shown to be enjoying presently favors from Bush, just like the ones Mr. Lay did.
Rightist voting strength depends on a coalition of free-market believers and traditionalists. It is unwieldy: nothing is so corrosive of traditional mores as free markets; nothing is more traditional than calling for government curbs on thieving merchants.
Mr. Lays thieving shows so all can clearly see that markets are neither free nor well regulated, simply rigged, and Bushs connivance in the thefts makes the realization he is in on the fix just as unavoidable.
Free market believers have no defense against a fact of rigged markets; traditionalists always suspect markets of being rigged.
Free market believers without much real property of their own, the greatest proportion of them by far, must view with some alarm the routine deception of major accounting firms and mutual funds that Mr. Lay, by leave of Bush, engaged in, to his and his cronies profit. Free market believers with little property know enough to know it is they themselves who are the sheep these wolves seek.
Traditionalists, who are moved by a conscious thrill of virtue when, instead of serving their material interests by voting left, they stand and do the "right" thing by voting for a rightist candidate, with integrity and values, must view with some repulsion the greed displayed by those they have trusted to lead the nation. Mr. Lays thieving, and Bushs cash-bought conniving in it,