Dick Cheney's French problem
There's a certain amount of leeway we need to give the American media in election season. Certainly, when a Democratic candidate chooses to wear an argyle sweater, it's essential news. Or when the spouse of another one decides to dress as most adult Americans today do when they have a choice, in sneakers and jeans? Okay, put it on the front page.
But there are some stories that are just too trivial to bother with. I mean, does it matter that it looks like the vice president of the United States is about to be investigated for his role in an international bribery scandal? Can we really expect the American voter to care?
That seems to be the editorial decision being made across U.S. newsrooms -- which have, with minimal exception, ignored a percolating story about Dick Cheney's possible involvement in a shady Nigerian deal that a French judge is probing.
Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, now deeply enmeshed in the reconstruction of Iraq, is being investigated in France over "$180 million in payments connected with a huge Nigerian liquefied natural gas plant project won in the 1990s by a joint venture that included a subsidiary of Halliburton Co.," according to the Dallas Morning News' story last weekend -- the only significant U.S. press coverage for this story. All of this took place while Cheney was Halliburton's CEO. (There's more over at the Center for American Progress.)
Now, it's true that this investigation is proceeding in France, and we all know what the Bush administration thinks of the French. No one knows where this story will go, or whether we'll ultimately learn whether Cheney was involved. Still, you'd think the story would merit a little notice.
But I guess the nation's reporters and editors have more important matters to focus on. After all, if they spent too much time looking into Halliburton's past, they might miss a vein bulging on some Democratic candidate's forehead. And we couldn't have that, could we?
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