First, a couple of cartoons to whet the palate...

A Magical Visit to the Enchanted Land of the Free Market

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Today's Grammar Lesson: Simile

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Crime & the president's restatement of yearnings
Or, the semantic antics of the overly franchised

Every scandal, it seems, produces at least one classic and defining euphemism—a judiciously chosen word or phrase diligently employed to sugarcoat the sour reality at hand. In Watergate, it was press secretary Ron Ziegler's mechanical assertion that all his previous statements were "inoperative." In Vietnam, it was the military's use of "friendly fire" to soften the dreadful truth of soldiers killed by their own side.

And now we have corporate America's glittering contribution: "restatement of earnings." It sounds so innocuous and benign. Possibly even a good thing. Earnings are good after all. And "restating" is just the boardroom equivalent of asking for a do- over on the playground. It connotes a slip of the tongue, a wrongly chosen word, a failure to carry the 1 when doing your math homework. What it doesn't sound like is, well, what it is: out-and-out fraud involving the fleecing of billions of dollars from shareholders and pension funds.
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A Fox Is About to Reassure Us Hens
Can Bush scold Wall Street with a straight face?

For President Bush to pretend to be shocked that some of the nation's top executives deal from a stacked deck is akin to a madam feigning surprise that sexual favors have been sold in her establishment. Dubya may have gaps in his education, but ignorance of "aggressive accounting" techniques and other scams they don't teach in Biz 101 is not one of them.

Not only was the prez and ex-businessman himself a pro at milking failed corporations he made look good on paper, but too many family members, friends and members of his administration have been implicated in scandals of the sort he now condemns. For Bush to argue that the unraveling of corporate America is the work of a "few bad apples" is a dangerous line of reasoning for him because an embarrassing number of those apples have fallen very close to the tree of his presidency.
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Look out, George!