may have been simply to taint the last few politicians who might have been in a position to throw stones. There was apparently a shift in pattern at the end. As has been pointed out by Republicans, the last Enron contributions were to Democrats.

Frankly, I don't think the amount of damage that occured can be blamed on El Shrubito, he hasn't been in office long enough. I find it interesting that both the pretenders to the throne were oilmen, and then energy policy suddenly takes center stage.

The comparison between this situation and the Lewinski one seems quite short-sighted to me. This isn't Bush's Monica, this is Cheney's Health Care Reform. The other half of a presidential two-fer starts out the term with a bunch of closed door meetings and comes up with a highly questionable plan that accomodates the bigwigs of an industry in need of a smack upside the head. Said plan probably (but it's hard to tell for sure) provides said bigwigs with considerable financial rewards for, well, not much beyond cementing their status as bigwigs in an industry that is now less competetive and more monopolistic. And utterly fails to provide the needed smack upside the appropriate heads, gee, maybe because those heads were in the meetings.