Bolt down the kitchen sink, too...

RUMMAGING through the gory reports on the $50 billion con man, Bernard Madoff,  I could only conclude  that his Hun-like assault on Wall Street investors was more evidence of the regulatory laxity of the Bush Administration.  In this instance, the Securities and Exchange 

Commission.  The Culture was easy to define: government's role in the finance industry (as well as all other Federal enterprises) should be minimal at best, a conservative mantra whose morning exercise routine is to turn one's eyes the other way while the culprits ransack the goodies with the speed of the Wabash Cannonball.     

The mea culpas to that effect are already part of the SEC's confessions as the titled managers apologize for not  being more alert to warnings that Madoff's Ponzi company was an inside job that might not withstand intense questioning.  It was laissez faire at its  worst that now has sunk individual investors,  foundations, pension funds and God knows what else in its wake.  

But the legacy of the Bush Administration  will show numerous instances of meddling to  cut away interference with  the official Culture, in some bizarre versions as recent as Secretary of State Condi Rice's absurd insistence that not a single American dollar was lost to corruption in Iraq.  Not one!  

Culture?  Dr. Richard Carmona, the former surgeon general, complained that his speeches on stem cell research and teen pregnancy were heavilly edited to conform, not with science, but with the Bushies' philosophy.   Carmona said he had been "marginalized".  

And what about the NASA scientists who reported that they were warned to tone down their warnings about global warming?  And EPA technicians who were kept under wraps about emission controls at power plants?   The muffling of science by the Culture could not go on forever.  That will change the day Bush heads back to the ranch to think about another day job.  

I'm sure somebody is already  putting together the book on the abuses of this administration by an army of fractals, those tiny images that are exact replicas of the larger image that they band  together  to create.  I wonder where the values folks will go for their next jobs.  And not a moment too soon.  Such is the ugly moral of Bernard Madoff, the Securities and Exchange Commission et al.  Keep it away from the kids in your house.