Bush's big success...

Guest post by Howie Klein.

A few days I was ignoring the flatulence coming out of George Bush's face on CNN when I noticed an interesting crawl under his image. Someone I used to work for had had a big pay raise -- from $16.5 million a year to $22 million a year. His name is Dick Parsons and he became the CEO of TimeWarner in May of 2002 and added the Chairman of the Board title one year later.

After the death of the company's founder, Steve Ross, Time Warner fell prey to avaricious corporate predators from outside the company -- AOL's Steve Case -- and inside. Under that regime, of which Parsons was a part, the company lost tens of billions of dollars and the share price plummeted from over $90/share to around $20/share. Today it is almost exactly where it was when Parsons became CEO.

In all likelihood, at least $6 billion was looted by insiders, although I'm not accusing Parsons on being one of the ones who looted the company. Nor am I accusing him of being a visionary or a powerful force of any kind. I was a division president when he took over. I barely knew him and had the impression that he was a colorless bureaucrat who managed to wind up advancing up the corporate ladder by never making any waves. And he just gave himself a very nice raise. His contract expires next year and many think he harbors hopes to run for mayor of New York City. That raise he just got should be a good downpayment on that race.

And, yes, of course, he's a Republican.

The official propaganda that his staff wrote about him is quite heroic: