Right Hook: Conservatives kind to Edwards

Conservatives are surprisingly kind to Edwards, although Jonah Goldberg calls him Quayle-lite and Taranto blasts his lack of military experience. But others seem prepared to desert Bush in November.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mark Follman

July 7, 2004 | The most surprising thing about John Kerry's selection of John Edwards was the admiration a number of opinion-makers on the political right expressed for the North Carolina senator.

The newly minted ticket has disillusioned Republican Andrew Sullivan practically sounding like a card-carrying Democrat. Perhaps Sullivan intends to follow through at the voting booth on his recent hints of abandoning a war-bungling, anti-gay Bush administration.

"Well, this is just what I had hoped for -- and it's easily the best choice available to Kerry, who now passes his first presidential judgment test. Edwards is uplifting, while Kerry is a downer; he can touch the Democrats' heart, not just their minds and their wallets; he's fresh and youthful in a way that will only contrast sharply with Cheney; he can speak -- and we need more in politics who have his kind of rhetorical skill; he's positive, which is important in a rancid political atmosphere. Substantively, I don't like his background among the trial lawyers, nor his protectionism. But I've come to think of him as a decent man, who shied from the easy snarl in the primaries, and who believes in this country's promise in ways that some on the left have lost touch with. He's the anti-bitterness candidate. And his presence will change the dynamic. The trouble with Bush's and Cheney's fundamental position -- you cannot trust anyone else to wage this war -- is that it must inevitably conjure fear and danger. Americans also like broad grins and happy futures. Edwards will give them plenty."

London-based foreign policy wonk Gregory Djerejian, author of the Belgravia Dispatch blog, argues that Edwards is weak on national security. But he agrees with Sullivan that Bush-Cheney '04 would do well to take a cue from the happier, shinier Dems.

"I'm not one of those who think that Edwards will look like a cool as a cucumber Kennedy figure to a sweaty, Nixonian Cheney. Cheney will do just fine thank you -- while pointing out Edward's obvious weaknesses in the national security/foreign policy realm. But, bursts of profanity aside, Cheney may want to spend a few days on the beach before the debates, you know, hanging out -- the better so as to project a chiller vibe.

"All well and good to exude macho-gravitas and national security street cred -- but an avuncular (full-blown) smile here and there won't hurt either. Americans do like a winning smile -- a certain breezy optimism has always been part and parcel of the American national character. Put differently, Bush/Cheney can't just run on fear."

Admiration for Edwards aside, the expected offensive against him began in earnest. Opinion Journal editor James Taranto sees a close parallel between the various candidates' military records, arguing that Bush and Cheney deserve a pass in light of Edwards' own youthful lack of service.

"The choice of Edwards also shows the phoniness of the Democratic attacks on President Bush for serving in the Air National Guard and on Dick Cheney for not serving in the military. Unlike Kerry, who by the way served in Vietnam, Edwards, who by the way is the son of a mill worker, has no military experience. The New York Times notes that in a January debate Kerry made fun of Edwards's lack of military experience: 'When I came back from Vietnam in 1969, I don't know if John Edwards was out of diapers then.'"

National Review's Jonah Goldberg charges that Edwards is Dan Quayle-lite when it comes to national security.

"One need not go trolling through Nexis for quotes from prominent Democrats (and pundits) insisting that Dan Quayle lacked the qualifications to be vice president. He was elected to two terms in the House and two terms in the Senate (the youngest man ever elected to the Senate from Indiana). Quayle's foreign policy credentials simply blow away Edwards' by comparison. Whether foreign policy experience was more important in the declining days of the Cold War were more or less important than in the early days of the war on terror is an interesting debate ...

"Edwards is among the worst choices possible if the issue this fall is national security and terrorism. He's not very sharp on foreign affairs. He has very little experience (Please, stop citing junkets to Afghanistan as a qualification!). If the Bush campaign can really make this election about national security, Edwards may not become a full-blown liability, but he might not make much of an asset either."

Meanwhile, InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds thinks Edwards makes vice presidential rival Dick Cheney a major GOP liability.

"I have to say that I think the Republicans' attacks on Edwards as a 'sleazy trial lawyer' will misfire. That kind of thing appeals to the base, but most swing voters won't share that instinctive hostility -- and harping on it too much will just make the Republicans look like tools of Big Business ...

"My own prediction, by the way, is that at an opportune moment Cheney will drop off the GOP ticket for vague medical reasons and be replaced by someone whose selection will make a splash."

Reynolds also sees a certain Green appeal in the Edwards pick.

"Many journalists and bloggers will be thanking Kerry for picking someone who ran in the primary, as it makes all those archived Edwards items useful again. It's a pro-recycling ticket!"

Jacob Levy, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy blog, argued in May that the Bush camp was in "bafflingly deep denial" about losing Libertarian swing voters in '04. He says that Edwards for veep makes the Kerry ticket a lock for him, in light of the Bush administration's exceptional incompetence in policymaking. (Note to New York Post: Levy also says that a Gephardt pick would've been a Kerry deal-breaker for him.)

"This is really the first presidential race of my adult life in which I've had a very strong commitment about which major-party candidate was the lesser evil. I've had leanings in previous races, but they were uncertain, and typically mitigated by a sense that both major-party candidates had crossed some threshold of unacceptability. This time, it seems very clear to me that the Bush Administration has failed basic tests of competence in policymaking and execution, and of trusteeship of long-term interests like alliances and trade negotiations and moral credibility. I expect to dislike an awful lot of John Kerry's policies. But I don't expect that kind of failure of the basic responsibilities of the office. Four or eight or twelve years ago, I guess I wouldn't have known how important I found those considerations, as I hadn't seen a president who had failed along those dimensions. Now I have, and I do."

"Narrow-minded nationalists"
Though by no means a die-hard conservative, Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and occasional contributor to neocon journals, detailed her own disillusionment with the Bush White House in a recent essay in the New Republic. She's incredulous that an administration stacked with Cold War veterans could be so myopic when it comes to battling the rising threat of radical Islam.

"Incredibly, given their backgrounds, top Bush officials still seem not to understand that, like communism, radical Islam cannot be defeated with military power alone. Like communism, radical Islam is an ideology -- one that people will die for. To fight it, the United States needs not just to show off its firepower, but also to prove to Arabs that Western values, in some moderate Islamic form, will give them better lives. The war on terrorism cannot be a narrow American or American-Israeli military struggle, or we will lose it. Like the cold war, the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims abandon the radicals and join us.

"Mistakenly, I assumed this was what the president meant when he talked, in that vague sort of way, about 'democracy in the Middle East.' The fact that he was vague didn't bother me, since this president is vague about a lot of things. But I should have been warier since, in this case, his vagueness was not just a personality tic or a speech impediment, but a sign of a deep lack of seriousness."

Applebaum sees a dangerous provincialism percolating the administration's hollow rhetoric.

"The truth, of course, is that, for all its talk of universal human rights, this is not an administration that actually perceives itself as a part of something greater than the United States. For all of its talk about spreading American values to benighted foreigners, this is not an administration that even likes foreigners. It never occurred to me that American troops would arrive in Baghdad and have absolutely no idea what to do next, or who was important, or who was on their side. But then, I hadn't realized that the Pentagon leadership had no interest in or knowledge of the Iraqi people. I thought these were cold warriors, whereas in fact they are narrow-minded American nationalists, isolationists turned inside out."

The rise of "black blog ops"?
In a recent column for the Weekly Standard, right-wing pundit Hugh Hewitt raised some interesting questions about the ascent of the Web as a source of political news and information.

"Like a reverse Atlantis, a new archipelago of opinion and news providers has risen up from nowhere to drive stories and news cycles. So we should be asking about the potential for deception in the format. The web is widely used and relied upon. It would not be hard for intelligence services from around the world to build blogs with an intent to deceive or manipulate, putting out solid content to gain an initial audience before using it to disseminate disinformation intentionally.

"Similarly, the inevitable backstab blog has to be on some political consultant's mind. Get it started and growing as a pro candidate X blog. Build an audience via tried and true techniques -- including the purchase of blog-ads -- and then, late in a campaign, have the blog turn on candidate X. If any of the high profile lefties at work today --the Daily Kos or Atrios, for example -- were to suddenly turn on Kerry, citing implausibility fatigue, for example -- that would be news and a blow to Kerry. Could Kos really be working for Rove? The costs of starting a blog are so low that the mischief potential is quite high ...

"It is a brave new blogging world, and mischief beyond the easily spotted inanities of the MoveOn.org crowd will no doubt follow."
- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Mark Follman is an associate news editor at Salon.

Report: CIA Gave False Info on Iraq

DCI George J. Tenet introduces President Bush at the dedication ceremony for the George Bush Center for Intelligence with stories of former DCI Bush's term at CIA.


It's the same as being "out of the loop" by his pop in how Bush, Jr., hopes to exploit this finding. ---Sam


By KATHERINE PFLEGER SHRADER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons — were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA analyses, a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report asserted Friday.

Intelligence analysts fell victim to "group think" assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, the bipartisan report concluded. Many factors contributing to those failures are ongoing problems within the U.S. intelligence community — which cannot be fixed with more money alone, it said.

The report did not address a key allegation by Democrats: That Bush and other officials further twisted the evidence to back their calls for war against Iraq. The committee's top Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said he was disappointed the panel did not look into what he called "exaggerated" claims of the Iraqi threat by top administration officials...

Dog Ate Bush's Military Records Says Pentagon

"Thanks for getting me into that 'Champagne" unit of the National Guard here in Texas, Dad. Whew! That was a close one."

Pentagon: Bush Military Records Destroyed

Fri Jul 9,10:49 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Military payroll records that could more fully document President Bush's whereabouts during his service in the Texas Air National Guard were inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

In a letter responding to a freedom of information request by The Associated Press, the Defense Department said that microfilm containing the pertinent National Guard payroll records was damaged and could not be salvaged. The damaged material included payroll records for the first quarter of 1969 and the third quarter of 1972.

"President Bush's payroll records for those two quarters were among the records destroyed," wrote C.Y. Talbott, of the Pentagon's Freedom of Information and Security Review section. "Searches for back-up paper copies of the missing records were unsuccessful." (SEE LINK ABOVE FOR REST OF STORY)

Bush loses a lifelong Republican

"Pssss. You're such a failure that I can't vote for you."

I've heard this story over and over since Spring. Bush is losing older Republican voters. ---Sam


- Joan Ryan SF GATE
Thursday, July 8, 2004

My parents, like all parents who grew up in New York, live in Florida. They have voted down-the-line Republican in every election since they came of age. Despite their shared Catholicism, they couldn't stand John or Bobby Kennedy. Don't even talk to them about Ted. They still believe Nixon got a raw deal. Needless to say, they supported the Bush brothers in their respective elections, George for president and Jeb for governor.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the 2004 election. George Bush is managing to do what no politician has done before him -- drive my mother and father and others like them from their well-worn seats on the GOP bus.

"I can't vote for him,'' my father said as we sat in the Florida room of their adult-community condo. I nearly dropped the bottle of beer I had pressed to my forehead. ("What, you're hot?'' my mother had asked. The air conditioning was indeed on, as she assured me it was, set to a frosty 80 degrees.)

"He completely underestimated how the Iraqis would respond,'' my father said. We generally avoid politics when I visit. I'm from the gay-marrying, war- protesting, Michael Moore-loving republic of the San Francisco Bay Area. We tend to limit our current-events discussions to the Giants' chances in the National League West.

"They thought all these people were going to jump up and praise them,'' my father said. "There have been too many mistakes. We're supposed to have control over there, and our boys keep getting killed. It's a mishmash. The whole thing is a mishmash. He's backed himself into a corner by trying to liberate a country, and the people don't want you to be liberating them.''

His anger is about more than a difference of opinion with the president about how and why he waged this particular war. There is a corrosive quality to this presidency that has eaten away at what my father believes his country stands for. Anecdotal evidence suggests he is not alone. Republican leaders, however, will tell you the faithful aren't wavering. As evidence, they point to a bipartisan poll conducted for National Public Radio in May that found just 6 percent of Republicans say they plan to vote for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

But the poll means little. It asked the wrong question. My father would also have told them he doesn't plan to vote for Kerry. He'd cut off his finger before using it to cast a vote for a limousine liberal like Kerry. But his dislike for Kerry does not diminish his disillusionment with Bush. He won't vote for either of them, he says, leaving the top lines of his ballot blank for the first time in his life.

"Maybe I'll write in your mother's name,'' he said.

America's bloody entry into Iraq, with the torture and beheadings and charred bodies and gushing torrents of taxpayer money, is prompting a nation to take stock of who it is and what it believes in. I want to think that the war is diluting the blues and reds on the national political maps, that people are sloughing off their color-coded cloaks as Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, and recognizing the common ideals that bind us as Americans.

Those ideals -- among them, compassion, freedom, diplomacy, liberty, rule of law -- have been battered by a president who still can't produce a compelling reason to have sent our men and women into battle against a country that never attacked us. He tosses aside civil liberties as if they were Kleenex, denies basic due process even to American citizens -- a conceit the Supreme Court recently judged unacceptable -- and believes the Geneva Conventions apply only when he says they do.

My father has always enjoyed quoting the late Al Capp, the creator of the comic strip "Li'l Abner,'' who defended his conservatism in the 1960s by saying that he was and always had been a moderate. He only seemed conservative, he said, because the rest of the country had shifted to the left. There was a code of living in Capp's world, and in my father's. They believed in consistency bordering on stasis, even if it meant becoming a walking anachronism in your own lifetime.

My father and others like him who have always been more or less middle-of- the-road Republicans now feel out of step with this Republican president. It is not because their own ideals have shifted but because their president's have.

"It's terrible that in this country of so many good people,'' my father said, "how an election can come down to the lesser of two evils. You have to vote this time for who will do the least harm. Not the most good, but the least harm.''

Sometimes we settle for a president who isn't inspiring or visionary or all that brilliant. But we should never settle for one who diminishes America by flouting its core ideals. The election is four months away. My father could change his mind and, in the end, vote for Bush.

But I'm hoping my mother's name shows up on at least one ballot in Palm Beach County.

E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.

Ex-Chairman of Enron Surrenders and Faces 11-Charge Indictment

US President George W. Bush walks away from a briefing with the media, refusing to answer questions after he was asked about Enron and the reported indictment of former CEO Kenneth Lay, who was a close adviser and fund-raiser for Bush and his father, earning him the presidential nickname of 'Kenny Boy.'(AFP/Paul J. Richards)

And this guy campaigned on bringing "honor" and "accountability" back to the White House... ---Sam

By KURT EICHENWALD
and CHRISTINE HAUSER

Published: July 8, 2004

HOUSTON, July 8 — Kenneth L. Lay, the former chairman and chief executive of Enron, was charged on 11 counts in an indictment unsealed today related to the financial fraud that led to the collapse of the onetime energy giant.

The indictment, by a federal grand jury in Houston, includes charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and making false statements to banks... (see link above)

White House Downplays Bush-Enron Ties

Former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, left, is led into Federal Court by a law enforcment officer in Houston Thursday July 8, 2004. (AP Photo/Michael Stravato)


Hey, somehow the White House is forgetting how George flew with Kenny Boy on the Enron plane all over Texas and the nation back during his earlier campaign days. Bush (and his dad) sat with Kenny Boy at Ranger ball games. Dick Cheney had Kenny Boy into his office to meet over creating the new energy policy for the nation and consulted with him by phone and all while Cheney ignored the Hart-Rudman Commission's report on national security and its warnings of a terrorist attack on the U.S. And when California was being ripped off by Kenny Boy's Enron and other energy companies with huge financial supporters of Bush during its "energy crisis", he kept the Feds from both investigating the illegal wrong doings AND placing any price caps to find out what was so immorally wrong with the price gouging. Yeah, right. Kenny Boy was just a passing friend...---Sam


By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The White House sought Thursday to minimize President Bush's ties with indicted former Enron chief Kenneth Lay, saying it has been a long time since they talked and suggesting it was only a passing friendship.

When Bush was governor of Texas, he called Lay "Kenny Boy" and Enron was a big financial backer. Bush has received more than $550,000 in donations from Enron, its employees and their relatives during his political career — the most from any source.

Lay was accused in an 11-count indictment of being involved in a wide-ranging scheme to deceive the public, company shareholders and government regulators about the energy company that he founded and led to industry prominence before its collapse in 2001.

"Cracking down on corporate wrongdoing is a top priority for this president," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said when asked about Lay's indictment Thursday. "The administration is taking strong and aggressive actions to pursue corporate wrongdoers and to strengthen corporate accountability. I don't think I'm going to get into discussing specifically a criminal indictment."

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's campaign accused the administration of dragging its feet on Enron. "It was three years too late," Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said of the Lay indictment.

Trying to distance Bush from Lay, McClellan said Lay had supported many politicians, Democrats as well as Republicans. Altogether, more than 250 members of Congress from both parties have received Enron contributions.

"He was a supporter in the past and he's someone that I would also point out has certainly supported Democrats and Republicans in the past," McClellan said.

He also said that "it's been quite some time" since Bush and Lay talked.

Sources: Lay Indicted in Enron's Collapse

By KRISTEN HAYS, AP Business Writer

HOUSTON - Kenneth Lay, the former Enron Corp. chief executive who insisted he knew nothing about financial fraud at the energy trading giant, has been indicted on criminal charges, sources told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The action caps a three-year investigation that has already seen several other executives charged and, in some cases, already sentenced to prison for their roles in the company's scandalous collapse.

Lay was expected to surrender to federal authorities Thursday, said the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The specific charges remained under seal. Prosecutors from the Justice Department (news - web sites)'s Enron Task Force presented an indictment to U.S. Magistrate Judge Mary Milloy in Houston on Wednesday, and at their request she sealed both the indictment and an arrest warrant, the sources said.

A hearing before Milloy was scheduled for late Thursday morning. Lay's lawyer, Michael Ramsey, didn't immediately return a call for comment.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (news - web sites) was expected to bring civil fraud charges against Lay on Thursday, including making false and misleading statements and insider trading, a person familiar with the case said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Prosecutors have aggressively pursued the one-time celebrity CEO and friend and contributor to President Bush (news - web sites) who led Enron's rise to No. 7 in the Fortune 500 and resigned within weeks of its stunning failure. Barring last-minute delays, Lay is the 30th and highest-profile individual charged.

He will be the second Enron CEO to be charged. Jeffrey Skilling, who succeeded Lay and then stepped down abruptly in August 2001, shortly before the scandal broke, was charged with nearly three dozen counts of fraud and other crimes in February.

Waiting to testify for the prosecution is former finance chief Andrew Fastow, who pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts in January. Fastow admitted to engineering partnerships and financial schemes to hide Enron debt and inflate profits while pocketing millions for himself.

Enron's collapse led a series of corporate scandals that led to Congress' passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act two years ago, a package of sweeping reforms to securities law. Thousands of Enron's workers lost their jobs, and the stock fell from a high of $90 in August 2000 to just pennies, wiping out many workers' retirement savings.

The charges against Skilling and former top accountant Richard Causey target actions over several years leading up to Enron's collapse, while allegations against Lay were expected to focus on his actions after he resumed the role of CEO upon Skilling's abrupt resignation in August 2001, the sources said.

Days after Skilling's resignation, Lay met privately with Sherron Watkins, then an executive on Fastow's staff, who had sent him a lengthy memo warning of impending doom from Fastow's myriad schemes to hide debt and inflate profits.

But Lay told The New York Times last month that he didn't believe the company had serious problems and trusted other senior managers — including Fastow and Causey — when they reassured him that all was fine.

Skilling and Causey are awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy, fraud and insider trading. Both pleaded innocent and are free on bond.

___

AP Business Writer Marcy Gordon in Washington contributed to this report.

Judge sends message to all of us through Lea Fastow

By LOREN STEFFY
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

Don't cry for Lea Fastow.

Judge David Hittner is doing everything he can to turn the Enron heiress into a sympathetic character. With his decisions this week, Fastow seems more and more a hapless victim torn from the arms of her children and hauled off to the gulag.

In the latest indignity, Hittner ordered Fastow to report to the downtown Federal Detention Center instead of the more upscale calaboose in Bryan she'd requested. No horticulture classes or playground equipment for the kids, just a well-worn orange jumpsuit, public showers and an occasional trip to the roof for some incidental sunshine in the recreation area.

You can choose your crime, but not your punishment.

Lea Fastow is, by her own admission, a tax cheat. Her crime was being well-connected to an Enron insider — her husband, Andrew, Enron's former chief financial manipulator — and being all too willing to take her turn at the trough. Compared to her husband, though, she's a kid with a calculator.

In the last few months, Hittner has done all he can to make her the whipping girl for Enron's sins. He eschewed her plea deal in the spring, he's ignored her requests for more family-friendly incarceration, and he refused a request — which even the prosecutors supported — to send a standard background report on Fastow to the Bureau of Prisons. When Fastow's attorney, Mike DeGeurin, sent the report anyway, Hittner lambasted him in a 10-page order distributed to all federal judges in the region.

Lea, after all, was a tool. Prosecutors needed her husband's testimony, and he wasn't cooperating. So they went after Lea and threatened her with prosecution. She might go to jail at the same time as her husband, and what would happen to their two children? Andrew agreed to serve 10 years and rat out his old cronies, provided Lea would be out in time to watch over the little ones. It's an interesting twist on the trials of the two-career couple. Trying to juggle their busy prison schedules, the Fastows were hoping to still find time for the kids.

From the moment they agreed to plea, the Fastows have tried to work the legal system as if it were just another deal. They wanted to coordinate sentencing. Andrew would plea only if Lea was guaranteed a light sentence. It's as if they believed they still had some say in making the rules.

Lea Fastow is a symbol of the complacency that nurtures white-collar crime. Corporate executives don't usually go bad by breaking the law. They bend it slowly, inching toward criminality, a justification here, a rationalization there. And they convince others — often friends and family — to help them, by insisting that what they're doing isn't wrong, or that it would result in a greater good such as saving the company. Just tweak the numbers and fix it when the business improves.

In the Fastows' case, Enron's financial games were a family sport. The couple used their two children as a conduit to collect their Enron booty. Andrew disguised personal profits from the web of illicit partnerships he assembled as gifts to his children from associate Michael Kopper. Between December 1997 and February 2000, Andrew and Kopper funneled $45,000 in partnership loot through Lea, and $30,000 each in the form of "gifts" to the Fastow children, according to Andrew's indictment.

They drew their parents into Enron's web, too. They tried to set up Lea's father, Jack Weingarten, as an equity investor in an Enron partnership, according to the original six-count indictment filed against her in April 2003. An Enron attorney blocked the investment, calling it a conflict of interest, but Enron paid Weingarten a breakup fee. Lea later told her father's accountants that the fee was interest on a loan to Kopper, the indictment says. Weingarten wasn't accused of wrong-
doing.

Meanwhile, Andrew's father directed the nonprofit family foundation, whose principal cash came from a $4.5 million payment in 2000 from Southampton Place, a partnership that prosecutors say was set up by Fastow to profit from Enron partnership deals.

People who have talked to the Fastows in recent months say the couple still believe they did no wrong. They see themselves as victims.

By participating in the fraud, even tangentially, Lea Fastow forfeited the right to control her atonement. She entered a world where, perhaps for the first time in her life, she doesn't get to make the rules.

Does her sentence seem overly harsh? Sure. Is the judge using her to send a message, just as the prosecutors used her as leverage against her husband? Of course.

No deals are guaranteed. If tax fraud simply becomes a negotiated vacation — "OK, I'll do five months, but I'd like to have the corner cell with the view of the garden, and I'd like to be home before the kids start school in the fall" — then it becomes a predictable risk, a cost people can calculate. Knowing the price, some would simply pay it to get rich.

We can be sympathetic to the Fastows. Hittner's hard line at every turn makes us think of the family, of the children, and the consequences they must bear for their parents' bad judgment.

The judge, though, is sending a message to the rest of us, too, about the nature of fraud and the dangers of complacency. It's far easier to get sucked into schemes like Enron than most of us want to believe. And the time to make choices is before it happens, not before the judge.

Lea Fastow's incarceration will be hard on her, her family and, of course, the kids. That's something she should have considered when she was signing her tax returns.

What's more American than asking questions?

By Michael Moore

Michael Moore's latest documentary film is "Fahrenheit 9/11." (Sam Note: GO SEE IT!)

July 4, 2004

NEW YORK — As a young boy, I loved the American flag. I'd lead my younger sisters in patriotic parades up and down the sidewalk, waving the flag, blowing a whistle and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over and over until my sisters begged me to let them go back to their Easy-Bake Oven.

I loved singing the national anthem. I won an essay contest on "What the Flag Means to Me." I decorated my bicycle with little American flags for a Fourth of July parade and won a prize for that too. I became an Eagle Scout and proudly promised to do my duty to God and country. And every year I asked to be the one who planted the flag on the grave of my uncle, a paratrooper who was killed in World War II. I was taught to admire his sacrifice, and I hoped to grow up and do my part, as he had, to keep us free.

But, in high school, things changed. Nine boys from my school came back home from Vietnam in boxes. Draped over each coffin was the American flag. I knew that they also had made a sacrifice. But their sacrifice wasn't for their country: They were sent to die by men who lied to them. Those men — presidents, senators, government officials — wrapped themselves in the flag too, hoping that their lies would never be questioned, never be discovered. They wrapped themselves in the very flag that was placed on the coffins of my friends and neighbors. I stopped singing the national anthem at football games, and I stopped putting out the flag.

I realize now I never should have stopped.

For too long now we have abandoned our flag to those who see it as a symbol of war and dominance, as a way to crush dissent at home. Flags are flying from the back of SUVs, rising high above car dealerships, plastering the windows of businesses and adorning paper bags from fast-food restaurants. But these flags are intended to send a message: "You're either with us or you're against us," "Bring it on!" or "Watch what you say, watch what you do."

Those who absconded with our flag now use it as a weapon against those who question America's course. They remind me of that famous 1976 photo of an anti-busing demonstrator in Boston thrusting a large American flag on a pole into the stomach of the first black man he encountered. These so-called patriots hold the flag tightly in their grip and, in a threatening pose, demand that no one ask questions. Those who speak out find themselves shunned at work, harassed at school, booed off Oscar stages. The flag has become a muzzle, a piece of cloth stuffed into the mouths of those who dare to ask questions.

I think it's time for those of us who love this country — and everything it should stand for — to reclaim our flag from those who would use it to crush rights and freedoms, both here at home and overseas. We need to redefine what it means to be a proud American.

If you are one of those who love what President Bush has done for this country and believe you must blindly follow the president to deserve to fly the flag, you should ask yourself some difficult questions about just how proud you are of the America we now inhabit:

Are you proud that one in six children lives in poverty in America?

Are you proud that 40 million adult Americans are functional illiterates?

Are you proud that the bulk of the jobs being created these days are low- and minimum-wage jobs?

Are you proud of asking your fellow Americans to live on $5.15 an hour?

Are you proud that, according to a National Geographic Society survey, 85% of young adult Americans cannot find Iraq on the map (and 11% cannot find the United States!)?

Are you proud that the rest of the world, which poured out its heart to us after Sept. 11, now looks at us with disdain and disgust?

Are you proud that nearly 3 billion people on this planet do not have access to clean drinking water when we have the resources and technology to remedy this immediately?

Are you proud of the fact that our president sent our soldiers off to a war that had nothing to do with the self-defense of this country?

If these things represent what it means to be an American these days — and I am an American — should I hang my head in shame? No. Instead, I intend to perform what I believe is my patriotic duty. I can't think of a more American thing to do than raise questions — and demand truthful answers — when our leader wants to send our sons and daughters off to die in a war.

If we don't do that — the bare minimum — for those who offer to defend our country, then we have failed them and ourselves. They offer to die for us, if necessary, so that we can be free. All they ask in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. And with this war, we have broken faith with our troops by sending them off to be killed and maimed for wrong and immoral reasons.

This is the true state of disgrace we are living in. I hope we can make it up someday to these brave kids (and older men and women in our reserves and National Guard). They deserve an apology, they deserve our thanks — and a raise — and they deserve a big parade with lots of flags.

I would like to lead that parade, carrying the largest flag. And I would like the country to proclaim that never again will a war be fought unless it is our last resort.

Let's create a world in which, when people see the Stars and Stripes, they will think of us as the people who brought peace to the world, who brought good-paying jobs to all citizens and clean water for the world to drink.

In anticipation of that day, I am putting my flag out today, with hope and with pride.