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Originally Posted by summerkc
I'd like to disspell this new myth that the democrats have started saying.
Bush had a small ownership in a oil and gas company that later branched out into a timber business. This misunderstanding came out as a result as an error on factcheck.org and they have retracted that statement and corrected the error.
This is along the same lines as dems saying that Bush banned stem cell research. The only thing that Bush did was to not give any political funds to any new embyonic stem cells. There is still government funding for the original line of embryonic stem cells and there is full funding for adult stem cells which have shown more promise for cures than embryonic stem cells. Also, there is no ban on private funding to embryonic stem cells so if you believe in this, donate!
This type of stuff happens all the time on both sides and it drives me crazy.
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Rekna didn't seem to care whether President Bush had a timber company or not; I understood his comments to be more focused on how Bush handled himself and his reply. Nitpicking on whether he received money from this or that company is pretty irrelevant to me. In fact, I supposed when I heard the exchange during the debate, that the President probably didn't even know his assets. His money is in a larger portfolia that is managed by a group of people--he likely doesn't know the extent of his own ownership any more than I know the extent of my IRA's ownership.
While I may know that I have a slice of a stock in IBM and Microsoft, I wouldn't know anything about an obscure entitiy.
In any case, we shouldn't be surprised to find that the larger company 'diversified' into smaller, unrelated entities. That was the Senator's point--that larger companies split into smaller ones and gain substantial tax savings/dodges by doing so. So your comments would tend to support the Senator's point moreso than refuting them.
But no democrats that I know of care whether the President actually owned a company--we are marveling at his stupidity: the comment was just as effective even if it was a hypothetical. But he turned the comment away from the reality of tax evasion into a stupid personal joke.
Bush is incapable or unwilling to engage in abstract thought. He had a similarly confused expression when the Senator was explaining that he didn't vote for the *partial birth abortion ban due to a 17 year old girl who would be forced to report to her parents (one of which abused her).
Did this happen? Did the Senator really know a 17 year old girl in such a situation?
Does it matter for the point to be valid or should he have taken 30 seconds from his reply time to explain to the denser community that he could very well be speaking hypothetically?
*s/b abortion bill, I conflated his points on accident