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Aren't you overlooking the comparison of what Bush appears to have
accomplished, traded his influence and authority as the elected executive
of Texas, to achieve an attractive sale price and profit on the baseball team,
to the description of the charges that Illinois Governor Otto Kerner was
convicted of? The difference between the cases is that Kerner was convicted
of much less serious abuse of his power, for a much smaller reward. an amount
small enough ($180,000) to be insignifigant to his total net worth; whereas
the bulk of Bush's current net worth stems directly from the proceeds of the
sale of the Texas Rangers, combined with the $2.4 million he "saved" by
misstating $12 million of earned income as a long term captial gain.

Do not forget that $40,000,000 was spent in an investigation by a special
prosecutor (an estimation of the portion of the $60,000,000 total investigation expense.....) in an attempt to find the Clintons culpable in
a criminal wrongdoing in a real estate fraud, at the instigation of partisan
Republican legislators, on a less visible or convincing availability of evidence,
initially and later in the special prosecutor's final report.

Were your comments prompted more out of weariness of the never ending
partisan exchange of accusations, or because you think that Bush is being
unfairly singled out?

A large part of my motivation for highlighting this chapter of Bush's past
is that the uncontested, verifiable details of this situation are that they
obviously show an hypocricy on Bush's part. He seems to have one, conservative standard of what governments role should be in providing subsidies aimed at improving the lives of the common American, and providing a safety net for working people in times of economic downturn and in the crises that randomly affect individual families, yet a much more benevolent
and forgiving standard when it came to using his personal influence, power of elected office, and that of his family connections, to improve the value of
his own private partnership's equity, first, at the expense of the taxpayers of
the city that hosted the Texas Rangers baseball team, and then later, all of
the taxpayers in the state of Texas. What happened to the concept of
avoiding even the appearance of impropriety.

I'm willing to concede that I am more condemning of Bush because he has
been so vocal about common people looking more to themselves than to
government to find a way to economic stability and increased quality of life,
while promoting corporate welfare at the taxpayers' expense in exchange
for personal profit and funding for his political campaigns, than I would be
solely on the strength of the disclosed evidence of possible wrongdoing.
I cannot see how anyone who examines this does not at least conclude that
Bush talks a different game about limiting the role of government than the
game he himself as actually played.