The administration continues to try to get people to believe that the corporate scandals are only the result of a few bad CEOs who have ruined the grand ol' times for everyone. In fact, they figuratively crowed as the cable CEOs were carted away to jail. "See," they said, "it's just a few like these guys, and we're going to put them in jail."

I don't buy it, and as Jill pointed out to me last night, it's easy to point to something in the government itself that points to how shady accounting schemes are not the province of Enron, WorldCom, or any number of SEC investigations. Just look at Bush's budget and tax plan.

When Bush was made the new CEO of our country by the Supreme Board of Directors, he decided that the company had enough coin in the coffers to give some of it back to the shareholders in the form of a big tax cut. Smaller shareholders, the majority of us, got a dividend check. Larger shareholders have the options in later years to increase their share holdings by avoiding taxes and fees previously leveled against them. Naysayers warned CEO Bush that he couldn't give that much money back--that he needed to save some for a rainy day, and that even given the accounting sheets as prepared by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the cuts would severly reduce the company's ability to operate. Bush, instead, relied on his good buddies in the Executive Accounting Office (former heads of Arthur Anderson) to present a much rosier picture of how his tax rebate would look in years ahead.

Do I have to continue this less than pretty picture? I could, like Ross Perot, pull out some graphs. And, lest you blame the budgetary shortfall on September 11, note that the economy started tumbling and the numbers were started to be revised months before that. If anything, September 11 has enabled Bush's accountants to hide the fact that he was claiming extra money and not showing the full loss on his books.

Corporate responsibility starts at home, CEO Bush.

Too bad for us there's no SEC to look over the government's books.