By Andrew Meaney

The recent revelations that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney may have violated laws while working in the private sector has added more fuel to the corporate American fire. As the Bush Administration tries to restore confidence in the embattled economy, suspicions of greed and fraud within the most senior levels of government are disturbing American citizens. Democrats, while pretending to be distressed, are secretly celebrating the arrival of a long-awaited issue on which they can attack the White House.

For months now, Democrats have attempted to implicate the Bush Administration in the ongoing wave of corporate scandals. At the beginning, the collapse of Enron was seen as a great opportunity to tarnish President Bush's post-9/11 popularity. Prominent Democrats appeared all over the airwaves to bash the Bush Administration for attempting to save Enron from financial ruin.

As it turned out, two senior officials in the Bush Administration refused a request by Robert Rubin, the former Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, to upgrade Enron's financial reliability rating on Wallstreet. The Bush Administration left Enron exposed as the greedy and despicable entity it was.

Still, the Democrats would not relent. After the collapse of Worldcom, their rhetoric remained accusatory. Because there was absolutely no evidence to connect the President to the Worldcom scandal, Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt led Congress astray on yet another witchhunt. They claimed that President Bush had created "an environment of permissiveness" within corporate America.

Exactly how did the Bush Administration give corporate America the green light to take advantage of investors? Maybe if the President had shut down our stock markets, and created state-owned companies to end all competition, then he would be innocent. How else could President Bush have prevented the accounting tricks that brought down almost half a dozen corporations?

Luckily for the Democrats, the latest developments have been easier to manipulate into political weapons. Most important is the allegation that President Bush committed insider trading in the early 1990's while sitting on the board at Harken Energy. The SEC investigated the President, who was then a private citizen, and found no wrongdoing. But Democrats have resurrected the failed charges in hopes of casting doubt on the President. Democrats realize the American people want an end to corporate malfeasance, and are likely to disdain any hypocrisy in their government. It is as if the Democratic Party were a pack of hound dogs waiting to pounce upon its prey regardless of the collateral damage.

What the Democrats forget amid their brutal personal attacks is that truth, as usual, is not on their side. Any patriotic politician would look beyond the charade and work to solve the real problems at the root of corporate greed. Moreover, any reasonable person would give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt. While he belatedly filed the record of his stock sale with the SEC, Harken Energy stock rebounded less than a year later to double the price at which Bush sold it. If he had substantial insider knowledge, why would Bush have sold his stock before the surge in price?

The pending SEC investigation of Vice President Cheney's tenure at Halliburton has also been at the heart of the Democratic agenda. They continue to take facts out of context and cleverly distort them to discredit Republican public officials. The facts show that the Vice President committed no transgression. Halliburton merely changed the way in which it reported revenue without punctually notifying the SEC. Unlike Ken Lay, Cheney did not hide costs or shield debt from investors. He did his job as CEO by having his corporation more accurately and efficiently report revenue to the public domain. By Enron standards, this is hardly fraudulent and does not merit the character assassination of the Vice President.

Questioning the credibility of the two highest-ranking officials in our government with next to no proof is unconscionable when the priority should be restoring confidence and integrity in the stock market. Rather than speculating on President Bush's financial portfolio more than a decade ago, or on what Cheney knew and when he knew it while at Halliburton, Democrats should be persuading the American people that the stock market can be trusted and will perform well with time. Corporate greed should not deter investors from trusting the long-term safety and stability of the stock market. If Democrats continue to fabricate links between the Bush Administration and corporate malfeasance, they will be the ones to blame for the greatest financial crisis in American history.

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Andrew Meaney is an Adjunct Scholar at Frontiers of Freedom, a non-profit, non-partisan public policy institute dedicated to protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans and restoring constitutional limits on the extent and power of government. You may email the author at ameaney@ff.org