I checked out "The Smartest Guys in the Room", the inside story of the Rise and Fall of Enron, the other night. Great documentary. Makes you want to break out a machete and hack something.
There were multiple soundbites of Skilling and Lay, wide-eyed and grave, insisting that they could't possibly have known about the antics of Fastow who was cooking the books in their company. He was, after all, a rogue employee. His fraud was, in the words of our old friend Ollie , a stand-alone, off the shelf kind of an operation.
First off. When you pull $300 million out of your own company in stock and bonuses you'd better know all that's going on on your watch - right down to who's stealing paperclips.
I had a vague feeling of deja vu. Then it hit me. Another soundbite.
Condi Rice batting her eyelashes before the 9/11 commission insisting that no-one could possibly have known that Bin Laden would have arranged for a plane to be flown into a U.S. building. (With the possible exception of the people who found written plans for just such an event several years before and a further exception for the individuals in the FBI who received those reports).
Bushco loudly protesting that the tortures inside Abu Graib
were the work of rogue nutcases working alone. How could the military, let alone the White House, possibly know what was going on inside a prison they had commandeered? What were they supposed to do - see thru walls?
And who could possibly have forseen that the levees would break?
In the words of Shecky Greene. "Who Knew!"
Kenny-boy and Dubya. What a great double act they'd make. The only discernible difference between them at this point being that one of them is virtually certain to see the inside of a cell.
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