Byron York on Enron & Waxman on National Review Online

I watched Malcolm Gladwell today on C-SPAN 2, talking about his book The Tipping Point. He reminded me of two things: the spate of suicides in Europe after Goethe's novel Die Leiden Des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) in which the title character kills himself for love. The second thing his discussion reminded me of was the Enron scandal and how many things have been inferred from it that are just not supported.

He discussed another suicide epidemic in Micronesia which began when a rich son of a prominent family killed himself after becoming involved in a love triangle which became a scandal.
As it developed young people would kill themselves over the most trivial upsets.

He also applied this phenomenon to the avalanche of people in Europe began getting sick after drinking Coca Cola. Nothing was ever found in the drink itself, and, it turned out, many of those who claimed to have gotten sick had actually drunk Pepsi.

The Enron scandal has spread a shockwave throughout Washington, mostly because a lot of Democrats see it as proof that Enron gouged California in its time of electrical crisis, and Enron gave a lot of money to help George W. Bush in is presidential campaign. Even though there is no evidence that Enron's access or urging had changed the administration's policies on anything (Dick Cheney being very intelligent and experienced in his own right in the energy field), the media and the Democrats and even some Republicans, not to mention a lot of the population, see the scandal as proof that we need more campaign finance reform laws. The undue influence of the Enron company on government policies is now presumed before any discussion, so that whether it really had any is no longer even discussed. It has all the markings of one of these idea epidemics, like the Dot.Com bubble, and the view that Clinton's sexual promiscuity was his own private business and not a matter for public concern, even though it wasted vast amounts of his and our time, distracted all of Washington from the business of governing, and probably emboldened terrorists to ramp up attacks on us.

Another such bizarre argument was that the impeachment was unfair because it was not bipartisan, as though the refusal of the Democrats to cross party lines somehow made the whole thing illegitimate, when it was the integrity of some Republicans which caused them to support the impeachment of Richard Nixon and ended in his resignation. If they had just held the party line, the whole thing would have become an illegitimate inquiry and Nixon would have been exonerated?

These defenses put out by Clinton's political team were adopted uncritically by Democrats and spread in an epidemic manner.
The same thing happens, of course, among Republicans and conservatives, but not nearly so sweepingly. There are the extremists who think that the U.N. is running the U.S., etc. but they have not such influence on their end of the political spectrum as the lies of Bill and Hillary Clinton seem to have on theirs.

It would be interesting to apply Gladwell's analysis to the political issues of the past 20 years, and how arguments and suggestions spread epidemically through Washington and the media without criticism or careful thought.