Left and Right: Enron, Monica and Blue-Light Specials

There’s nothing that pricks up the ears of the chattering classes like a whisper of presidential scandal, preferably a lovely quagmire to which the suffix “gate” can be appended. Watergate, Iran-Contragate, Monicagate--a seemingly endless parade of White House imbroglios play out with a ceremonial majesty. They present a kaleidoscopic pageant of congressional hearings, subpoenas and leaked testimony, providing so many chances for TV face-time that they might be termed the Punditocracy Full Employment Act.

While the financial chicaneries of the fallen Enron energy trading company have not yet achieved full “gate” status, partisan commentators are testing the waters, hoping no doubt that President Bush’s cozy relationship with the Texas sharpies will provide a platform big enough to ride at least into the midterm elections. Predictably, liberals see Enron as the QE2 of scandals, while conservatives dismiss it as a minor business story.

Sean Wilentz in the American Prospect positively rhapsodizes that Enron “is shaping up as quite possibly the largest political and financial scandal in American history,” dwarfing the Teapot Dome and other Gilded Age excesses. Later in his piece, however, Wilentz muddies the waters by opining that the $1.4 trillion savings-and-loan bailout of the late 1980s “may well be the largest single theft in world history.” Ah, consistency, the hobgoblin of small minds.

Wilentz goes on to concede that the Democrats are just as chummy with K Street energy lobbyists as the Republicans. But three guesses who’s to blame for the Enron mess. “Enron is the belated culmination of the age of Ronald Reagan, George Bush the elder, and Newt Gingrich,” he says.

Not so, says Green Party mascot Ralph Nader, who, having been spurned by the left for his quixotic electoral challenge to Al Gore, is back in the fold with his broadsides against politicians of all stripes who took money to do Enron’s bidding, The Nation’s John Nichols reports.

The conservatives are not taking Nader’s bait, however. Rather than going after the Dems, the party line seems to be that Enron is no big deal. “Nobody lost electrical power. Kmart’s bankruptcy was more consequential economically,” sniffs the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnoru. Well, that’s a comfort. Except David Moberg of In These Times says Enron is responsible for the power outages of California’s energy crisis one-and-a-half years ago. Or, at least a deregulation bill shoved through by Texas GOP Sen. Phil Gramm on Enron’s behalf is responsible. How’s a mere media columnist to know the truth?

Raising the specter of impeachment, The Nation’s editors link Enron to the Monica Lewinsky scandal as the latest battle over presidential “values.” And, just in case you didn’t get the point, there’s the witty cover art by Stephen Kroninger depicting Dubya, looking suspiciously like Howdy Doody, with his finger in the air echoing former President Bill Clinton’s famously misleading Lewinsky-era declaration, “I did NOT have financial relations with that corporation.”

TV news elder Daniel Schorr, who’s never missed a chance to trot out a Watergate war story, hears the handcuffs jangling. And he’s not afraid to use the “G” word. “Watergate, Irangate, and now Enrongate?” Schorr writes in the New Leader. Referencing news stories about Enron execs frantically chewing up documents on their way out the door, Schorr adds, “As a senior Gatekeeper, I say when you hear the shredder at work, it’s time to take notice.”

More surprisingly, National Review economics columnist Larry “Hang ‘Em High” Kudlow also sees prison bars. “Jail ‘em. All the Enron and Arthur Andersen principals and then some,” Kudlow writes, a bit of right-wing apostasy that can be explained, Chris Mooney writes in American Prospect, by the columnist’s disclosure in the same piece of the $50,000 in consulting fees he received from Enron.

George Gilder of The American Spectator takes the long view on the Enron fracas. Happens every recession, the fervent supply-sider yawns, this “flood of factitious crimes, this parade of snaffled fat cats and scapegoats...The proximal cause of these imbroglios is nearly always found in government tax, regulatory and monetary policies.”

Blond Republican babe Ann Coulter jeers at the outpouring of sympathy for Enron employees who lost their pensions. “Before the New York Times starts running ‘Portraits in Grief’ of former Enron employees, it’s worth remembering that even after the collapse, Enron stock is still worth more than the entire Social Security ‘trust fund’,” Coulter meows with her trademark sensitivity in FrontPage Magazine, leftie-turned-rightie David Horowitz’s online rag. “The only beef Enron employees have with top management is that management did not inform employees of the collapse in time to allow them to get in on the swindle.”

Speaking of Kmart, the Blue-Light specialist seems to have captivated the National Review, which has a second article poking gentle fun at the big-box retailer’s collapse. “The big retailer has been world-famous for slow service,” writes Dave Shiflett. “The cashiers were trained to improperly ring up purchases, and a price check could take a month or two, with the original checker resigning halfway through the job and his or her replacement not coming along for another six weeks ....I myself have been tempted, during slow months in hackdom, to don the red vest of a Kmart employee. It wouldn’t have been so bad. I could have crept back to the supply room and found a place to nap, along with the rest of the staff.” Shiflett goes on to memorialize the chain as a great American equalizer.

The National Review also hosts a paean to the Queen of England on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee. The Queen, not Prime Minister Tony Blair or Parliament is responsible for turning its military into a “smaller twin brother of American efficiency,” British journalist Paul Johnson enthuses. And we have her “matchless skills” and the “convenience of a permanent head of state who is there by right, not periodic election,” to thank. Democratic claptrap like elections do tend to get in the way of rolling out the caissons on time, eh, Johnson?

Collateral damage is another front-line issue for the left and right this month, specifically civilian body counts. The Nation’s Christopher Hitchens gives Bush a pass on the issue, asserting that the U.S. Afghan campaign concluded with “no serious loss of civilian life, and with an almost pedantic policy of avoiding ‘collateral damage.’”

But editors of The Progressive count 3,767 civilian bodies in the first nine weeks of the U.S. war. “This heaping of death upon death has led to a huge mound of bodies, which is no cause for celebration,” they say. Noam Chomsky, writing in Z magazine, asserts that 100 people a day were dying in just one Afghan refugee camp.

The libertarian Reason magazine, however, cautions against death counts circulated by “loonies on the left.” Examining the oft-repeated 500,000 child death figure cited by opponents of U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq, author Matt Welch uncovers a comedy of misrepresentations and mindless repetitions that fatally contaminates the count. In the end, however, Welch says there’s evidence the sanctions have contributed to more than 100,000 deaths since 1990, more than enough to justify revisiting Iraqi policy.

But enough about death and taxes. Sex also reared its head in the pages of the partisan press this month. Back at the American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., who learned all about the power of sexual peccadilloes in his relentless Monicagate/Troopergate pursuit of Clinton, has a plan for cleaning up Al Qaeda’s remaining “dung-heaped dungeons”: Air-drop Victoria’s Secret lingerie catalogs.

“Anyone familiar with the September 11 atrocities knows that these fellows are sexually repressed,” Tyrrell writes. “In their last days before they presented to Allah their spotless souls, the soterial softas pursued research at advanced adult book stores and tutorials with prostitutes in Boston and strippers in Las Vegas...The bras will madden them. The panty ads will turn their hearts against the squinting Mullahs forever.” Soterial isn’t in my vocabulary, but I’m sure since it’s in Tyrrell’s, that it’s a sneeringly good modifier for softa (burningly zealous Mosque school student).

Lest you worry that the conservative magazine views sex as merely a political tool, the American Spectator’s monthly edition also features a Playmate of the Month. But don’t get all hot and bothered. American Spectator’s Miss February, in all her glory, is ... the envelope, please, ... Saddam Hussein. But rest assured, there’s not a bra or panty in sight, and the centerfold is fully clothed.