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Arbusto

mahdi

https://books.google.com/books?id=2p6LDwAAQBAJ

3 mil$ nat res almost 2 gas and oil sector; 13x Gore; 1998-2003 hallib over 1 mil$ gop 55k$ dems]; b43 got more oil $ than any other fed cand; 9 days before inaug API HQ K street mtg to draw up wishlist; ez drill fed land, more alaska an GOM, lower royalty for offshore etc; --> energy plan may 2001; API appt to admin: newsweek says not since rise of railroads so many footsoldiers; energy ceo 22.5m$ to BC has constant access to secret energy task force; lay b43 pal had most access; cheney starts mtgs w/ ff ceo contributors;energy sec [NPI advisors] had 109 mtds spencer abraham betw jan and may 2001, incl chevtex, exxxonmobil and enron, all big donors;

arbusto fail bought by spectrum? fail bought by harken (soros and harvard] for 2.25m$ in stock; b43 go 600K$ and bd seat 50-120K/yr

cheney secdeg 1990 got b41 to go after saddam in kuwait b/c of oil; aei kazakstan caspian pipeline operated by chevron, hallib built refineries Tengiz; azerjajan --> hallib ceo oct 1995 (he had good rel w/ saudis as secdef] 1994-2001 rev up 127%

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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ws-first-enron-connection-update-bush-enron-oil-deal/

no lnx

note: Below is David Corn’s article, posted on March 4, 2002, that first broke news of the Bush-Enron oil deal. An update follows.

Did George W. Bush once have a financial relationship with Enron? In 1986, according to a publicly available record, the two drilled for oil together–at a time when Bush was a not-too-successful oil man in Texas and his oil venture was in dire need of help. Bush’s business association with Enron, it seems, has not previously been reported.

In 1986, Spectrum 7, a privately owned oil company chaired by Bush faced serious trouble. Two years earlier, Bush had merged his failing Bush Exploration Company (previously known as Arbusto–the Spanish word for shrub) with the profitable Spectrum 7, and he was named chief executive and director of the company. Bush was paid $75,000 a year and handed 1.1 million shares, according to “First Son,” Bill Minutaglio’s biography of Bush. Under this deal, Bush ended up owning about 15 percent of Spectrum 7. By the end of 1985, Spectrum’s fortunes had reversed. With oil prices falling, the company was losing money and on the verge of collapse. To save the firm, Bush began negotiations to sell Spectrum 7 to Harken Energy, a large Dallas-based energy firm owned mostly by billionaire George Soros, Saudi businessman Abdullah Taha Baksh and the Harvard Management Corporation.

The deal took months to work out. In September of 1986, Spectrum 7 and Harken announced they had reached an agreement. Spectrum 7 shareholders, under the plan, would receive Harken stock. Bush publicly said that Spectrum 7 would continue to operate in Midland, Texas, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Harken and that he would become an active member of Harken’s board of directors. As Minutaglio noted, the deal would give Bush about $600,000 in Harken shares and $50,000 to $120,000 a year in consultant’s fees. It also would provide $2.25 million in Harken stock for a company with a net value close to $1.8 million.

As the details of the Spectrum-Harken acquisition–which Bush badly needed–were being finalized, Enron Oil and Gas Company, a subsidiary of Enron Corporation, announced on October 16, 1986, that it had completed a well producing both oil and natural gas in Martin County, Texas. An Enron Oil and Gas press release reported the well was producing 24,000 cubic feet of natural gas and 411 barrels of oil per day in the Belspec Fusselman Field, 15 miles northeast of Midland. Enron held 52 percent interest in the well. According to the company’s announcement, 10 percent belonged to Spectrum 7. At that point, Spectrum 7 was still Bush’s company. Harken’s completion of the Spectrum 7 acquisition was announced in early November.

To spell it out: George W. Bush and Enron Oil and Gas were in business together in 1986–when Ken Lay was head of Enron.(Lay was named Enron chairman in February of that year.) How did this deal come about? Was this the only project in which Bush and Enron were partners? A call placed to the White House produced no response. Karen Denne, an Enron spokeswoman, says “I can’t tell you anything about” that project, explaining Enron “sold all its domestic exploration and production assets about two years ago to EOG Reources” and probably did not retain records regarding that well. As for the possibility Spectrum 7 invested in other Enron ventures, she notes, “You’re referencing something that happened in 1986. I can check, but we’re pretty short-staffed now.” Elizabeth Ivers, a spokeswoman for EOG Resources (formerly Enron Oil and Gas), says, “If we did have any records on that well, it would be nothing that we would share with the public. We do not disclose the details or specifics of who we have well interests with.”

After the Enron affair began generating front-page headlines, Bush attempted to distance himself from Enron and Lay. In early January, the President claimed he and Lay had not always been close pals. “He was a supporter of [Texas Governor] Ann Richards in my run [against her] in 1994,” Bush asserted, noting he did not get “to know Ken” and work with him until after he won that election. But campaign records show Lay donated three times as much money to Bush in that race as he did to Richards. Moreover, contacts between Lay and the Bush family pre-dated that campaign. In 1992, Lay chaired the host committee for the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, where Bush’s father won his second presidential nomination. And Lay was a sleepover guest at the White House of President George H.W. Bush.

The Enron-George W. Bush connection goes back further than the President has suggested. But does that mean the relationship between the younger Bush and Lay stretches to the mid-1980s? The deal could have happened without contact between Lay and Bush. But most company heads would be interested to know that the son of the sitting vice-president had invested in one of their enterprises. If Lay had been aware of the partnership, that would not prove the two were pals or that Bush and Spectrum 7 had received undue consideration from Enron. But given Enron’s penchant to use political ties to win and protect business opportunities, it is tough not to wonder if this Bush-Enron venture involved special arrangements. This is certainly one more Enron partnership that deserves scrutiny–especially since George W. Bush has yet to acknowledge it. The Spectrum-Enron deal is either an odd historical coincidence or an indication there’s more to learn about the Bush-Enron association.

NOW FOR AN UPDATE ON THE BUSH-ENRON OIL DEAL:

On March 6, two days after this story was first posted, “The New York Times” ran on the front page of its business section a story headlined, “Bush Joined Unit of Enron In ’86 Venture To Seek Oil.” The article, written by Jim Yardley, essentially reported the facts noted above. Halfway into the piece, it noted, “A columnist in The Nation, the liberal political journal,…wrote about the deal this week in its online edition.”

While the Bush White House did not respond to a request from “The Nation” for information, White House spokesman Dan Bartlett told the “Times” the President “has no recollection of this specific deal.” Bartlett maintained that in 1986 Spectrum 7 was involved in more than 175 wells. Ted Collins Jr., who was president of Enron Oil and Gas at the time, told the newspaper that Bush did not have “a special relationship” with the company. Collins also asserted that Lay back then “wouldn’t have known who Spectrum 7 was and that George W. Bush had anything to do with a company called Spectrum 7.”

Since the story was originally posted, I have found records suggesting that Bush’s Spectrum 7 had a second partnership with Enron. In May of 1985, a subsidiary of InterNorth, an Omaha-based energy company, announced the completion of a well in Martin County, Texas. According to “PR Newswire,” the company said that Spectrum 7 owned an 18.75 percent interest in the well. (The rest was held by the InterNorth subsidiary.) The well, like the one mentioned above, was located at the Belspec Fusselman Field. That same month, InterNorth merged with Houston Natural Gas (HNG)–which gave birth to Enron. HNG/InterNorth changed its name to Enron in 1986, and the InterNorth subsidiary that had invested in the well with Spectrum 7 became part of Enron Oil and Gas. If Spectrum 7 and Enron Oil and Gas had retained their interests in the well, that would mean that Bush’s oil company was in partnership with Enron before the deal reported above. Since Bush, according to his spokesperson, does not have a memory for such details and EOG Resources says it will not release any information about wells it has owned, it will be tough to confirm that the InterNorth-Spectrum 7 venture became an Enron-Spectrum 7 enterprise.

On another, more important, Enron-Bush point: Way back in 1994, I reported that Rodolfo Terragno, a former Argentine cabinet minister, had claimed that when he headed the Public Works and Services Department in 1988, George W. Bush, whom Terragno did not know, called him and pressured Terragno to award a pipeline contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Enron. (See http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020204&s=corn.) Terragno, who said he resisted this and subsequent importuning, could not provide proof that the call had occurred. (How can you prove you were phoned by the son of the Vice-President?) Bush’s aides denied Terragno’s account. But it’s worth taking a second look at those denials.

At the time I was pursuing the Terragno story, Bush was running for Texas governor, and I asked the campaign whether Bush had spoken to Terragno about the pipeline project and whether he had any business relationship with Enron. Bush aide Karen Hughes faxed me a terse statement: “The answer to your questions are no and none. Your questions are apparently addressed to the wrong person.” An Enron spokesperson said, “Enron has not had any business dealings with George W. Bush, and we don’t have any knowledge that he was involved in a pipeline project in Argentina.”

The recent news about the 1986 Enron-Bush venture in the Belspec Fusselman Field undermines (to be polite about it) those 1994 statements from Bush and Enron denying any business relationship between the scion and the company. The existence of this oil partnership in 1986 (or one in 1985) has no bearing on the veracity of Terragno’s tale. But it shows the credibility of the Bush gang and that of Enron deserve questioning when either one is talking about the other.

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief. Until 2007, he was Washington editor of The Nation

Salem bin Laden

In 1979 Bush business Arbusto Energy obtained financing from James Bath, a close family friend. Bath had extensive ties to BCCI and the bin Laden family. Bath was the sole U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden, the brother of Osama bin Laden.It is well known in certain circles that the Arbusto money came straight from Salem bin Laden, although Bush denies it. Salem bin Laden died when for no apparent reason, he flew his airplane into power lines where it became entangled, and fell 150 feet to the ground. "He was a very experienced pilot. He was a good pilot. We just can't understand why he decided to go right instead of left," recalled airstrip owner Earl May field.

 wiki

Arbusto Energy (sometimes referred to as Arbusto Oil)[1] was a petroleum and energy company formed in Midland, Texas, in 1977, for former US President George W. Bush by a group of investors which included Dorothy Bush, Lewis Lehrman, William Henry Draper III, Bill Gammell, and James R. Bath. The company's chief financial officer was K. Michael Conaway, now a United States Congressman from Texas.

It was later revealed that Bath made an investment of $50,000 while representing Salem bin Laden of the Saudi Binladin Group. This fact became controversial after the September 11, 2001 attacks due to Salem bin Laden being an older, half-brother of Osama bin Laden, who is alleged to have planned and financed the attacks. Upon Salem bin Laden's death in a 1988 airplane crash, in Texas, his interest in Arbusto (along with other Binladin Group assets), passed to Khalid bin Mahfouz.

In 1982, Arbusto became known as Bush Exploration, a year after George H. W. Bush became Vice President. A friend of the Bush family, Philip Uzielli, invested $1 million in 1982 in exchange for a 10% stake in the company, at a time when the whole company was valued at less than $400,000. As it neared financial collapse again in September 1984, Bush Exploration merged with Spectrum 7 Energy Corp., a company owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. Bush became Chairman and CEO of Spectrum 7.

In 1985 Spectrum 7 reported a net loss of $1.5 million and was bought in 1986 for $2.2 million by Harken Energy, with Bush joining the Harken board of directors and finance audit committee.

In 1987 the Saudi investor Abdullah Taha Bakhsh bought most of Union Bank of Switzerland's shares in Harken becoming its third largest investor owning 17% of the company. He was represented on the board by Talat M. Othman. Another investor was Ghaith R. Pharaon, a partner of Bakhsh's, who would later be involved in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal, and is currently the target of an international dragnet.

In January 1990 with the company in the same state as its previous incarnations, it was awarded a contract to drill for crude oil off the coast of Bahrain, a move that shocked industry insiders as Harken had no previous experience outside of the US or of drilling offshore.

In June 1990 Bush sold more than half of his shares in Harken to a Los Angeles broker named Ralph D. Smith. One week after the sale Harken announced an overall loss of $23.2 million triggering an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission into the sale.

[ Further reading

[References

  1. ^ "Arbusto" is a Spanish and Portuguese word translating variously to "bush" or "shrub".

[ External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbusto_Energy"

Categories: George W. Bush | Osama bin Laden | Defunct American oil companies | Companies based in Texas | Midland, Texas | Companies established in 1977 | Companies disestablished in 1990 | Defunct companies based in Texas

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/bushwhacked.htm

...

In brief, Harken insiders borrowed money from their own company to buy a subsidiary at an inflated price. Then they booked sales revenue that didn't exist as profit. Then they got rid of the loan that had provided the revenue that never really existed. This is the kind of deal that made Enron famous. It allowed Harken to declare a modest loss of $3.3 million on its 1989 annual report, and as a result the company's shareholders had no clue how bad things were. And we all thought the smart guys at Enron invented those clever transactions.

...

In 1978 Dubya turned his attention to Arbusto Energy (that's "ar-BOOST-o," the Spanish word for "bush," according to George W., although Cassell's Spanish dictionary gives "shrub" as the only translation). Arbusto found its start-up money in Greenwich, Connecticut, and other Northeastern cities where Uncle Jonathan Bush could open the doors to executive suites. It was investors from Greenwich -- and one fat-cat doing business in Panama -- who took the hit when Bush's West Texas oil business went south. Russell Reynolds Jr. -- the sort of investor your average West Texas land man bootstrapping his way up through the oil patch would find a hard sell -- was a cold call for Jonathan Bush.

"Jon Bush called me one day and told me about his nephew George, who was in the oil business," Reynolds told the right-wing magazine American Spectator. "He asked me if I would be interested in investing. So George W. came to see me. And I thought he was an absolute star. A very attractive guy. Being a great friend of the Bushes, I put in a small amount of money in two of the partnerships."

George W. raised a total of $4.7 million in "small amounts," but he has not been too eager to tell the story. What the public knows about Bush's oil-field days has been turned up the hard way: Reporters from the Dallas Morning News, Time, and the Texas Observer have pored over Securities and Exchange Commission documents to piece together the story ofArbusto Energy, Bush Exploration, Spectrum 7, and finally Harken Energy, the company that provided Dubya his less-than-graceful departure from the oil business.

The money flowed like fresh oil. Prudential-Bache Securities CEO George L. Ball invested $100,000. Celanese Corporation CEO John D. Macomber and venture-capital investor William H. Draper III put together $172,550. (Both later got political appointments to the Export-Import Bank during the Reagan and Bush administrations.) Lewis Lehrman, a multimillionaire from New York (who was 10 years ahead of the checkbook politics of Ross Perot and Steve Forbes -- he spent $7 million of his own money to lose the governor's race in New York in 1982), provided $47,500. FitzGerald Bemiss, a childhood friend of President Bush and godfather to Dubya's brother Marvin, invested $80,000. W. "could go to New York and talk people into giving him money," a Midland oilman said. "That made him a success."

Investors may have had another motive. Most of the money was raised between 1979 and 1982, when George Herbert Walker Bush was either running for president or serving as Reagan's vice president. And the money came from sources that weren't accessible to your average 32-year-old land man at a start-up company in West Texas. "These are all the Bushes' pals," Russell Reynolds told the Dallas Morning News in 1998. "This is the A-Team." (Reynolds helped raise $4 million for President Bush's 1988 campaign and contributed to George W. ' s gubernatorial campaigns.) The same A-Team has raised so much money for Dubya's presidential bid that he decided to forgo matching federal funds and the spending caps that come with them. In oil, as in politics, Dubya's m.o. is consistent: Leverage the family name and a small investment into really big money, always provided by others.

The A-Team couldn't keep Dubya afloat when the price of oil started to fall. Arbusto had drilled almost 100 wells, and half of them hit oil -- about average for Permian Basin exploration in the '80s. But all the big, easy discoveries had been made decades earlier, when President Bush made his first million in Midland. The younger Bush -- who on occasion referred to himself as George Bush Jr., until he began his 1994 gubernatorial campaign -- never "bagged the elephant" that would make a profit for his investors. In fact, the best return many investors got was tax deductions;on some projects as much as 91 percent of the capital invested was written off, in schemes so elaborate that one Arbusto prospectus included 11 pages describing deductions available to investors.

By 1982, with little more than tax deductions keeping the A-Team in the oil field, Arbusto was badly undercapitalized -- almost Ar-busted. Then a white knight appeared, offering to buy 10 percent of the company for $1 million. This was not a steal for Philip Uzielli, considering that the company's book value was $382,376, according to financial statements.

"A company balance sheet can be misleading," Bush would later say. "There was leaseholds, there was momentum." There was? Even if you don't have a Harvard M.B.A., you can run the numbers and place your bets that Uzielli, the CEO of a Panamanian company called Executive Resources, had not earned his millions on investments like the one he made in Midland. For a million dollars, Uzielli purchased 10 percent of a company worth $382,376 -- in other words, he bought assets worth $38,237.

Uzielli isn't talking anymore (in fact, since Dubya locked up most of the Republican money over the summer of 1999, no one is talking for the record), but it would be nice to know what he was buying. At the time Uzielli bailed out W., George Herbert Walker Bush was vice president, and a sure bet to run for president.

How did Bush and Uzielli get together? The governor says he never met Uzielli until the CEO stepped forward with $1 million to bail out Arbusto. Uzielli said he met George W. three years earlier. Bush press secretary Karen Hughes said she does not know when the two men met. What is known is that this old Princeton friend of James Baker dropped a million dollars on a losing venture owned by the son of the vice president of the United States. "What Uzi was betting on was, he's betting on me. He's betting on the oil business, he's betting on the ability for the industry to expand," Bush told the Dallas Morning News in 1994, when his business dealings were questioned by then-Governor Ann Richards.

"Uzi" -- speaking to the Morning News from his father's home in Florence, Italy -- called his Arbusto venture a "losing wicket." But, he added, management was not responsible for the company's poor performance. He had invested in a wildcatting deal and lost money, but it was "no fault of George," he said, adding that "the good Lord just didn't put any oil there." (In West Texas, there are geologists paid to find where the good Lord put the oil.)

Arbusto's next move was clearly George W.'s fault. In one of the few major business decisions he made, he changed his company's name to Bush Exploration in 1982 (at a time when his father was vice president) and offered shares to the public in order to expand and raise $6 million needed to keep the company working. He only raised $1.1 million. "I really realized that I had made somewhat of a strategic error," he said, in somewhat of an understatement. Investors outside the circle of family friends paid more attention to the bottom line than to the name on the company letterhead.

Bush admits his investors lost money -- but has maintained that a Petroleum Information Corporation report ranking Arbusto 993rd in Texas, with 16 wells producing 47,888 barrels, "sounds low." His prospectus and SEC filings offer a clearer picture: Limited partners contributed $4.67 million to various Bush funds through 1982 but got only $1.55 million back in profit distributions. They did get $3.9 million in tax write-offs. The oil bidness was not good to George W. Bush's investors.

By 1983 Bush (this time, Bush Exploration) was in trouble again. Oil-patch investment sources dried up as the price of oil, which a few years earlier had been climbing like the 1999 Dow Jones Index, no longer seemed a sure bet.

Dubya was yet again bailed out by big money. This time it was Mercer Reynolds III and William O. DeWitt Jr. -- two big-league guys who would later become major contributors to his father. Like Dubya, DeWitt had a B.A. from Yale and an M.B.A. from Harvard. His father had owned the Cincinnati Reds, and he co-owned an oil company called Spectrum 7 in need of someone to direct its Texas operation. Instead of hiring a headhunter or placing an ad in the Wall Street Journal, he buys a failing company so he can hire its CEO, and George W. Bush becomes the third-largest shareholder in Spectrum 7.

After a good start, Spectrum 7 also began to sink, and neither its recently hired CEO in Midland nor the guys in Cincinnati could keep it afloat. Again, as predictably as the hero would pull the damsel off the railroad tracks in The Perils of Pauline, another investor showed up to save Dubya's ass. In 1986, Harken Energy Corporation, which Time magazine called "one of the most mysterious and eccentric outfits ever to drill for oil," stepped in to buy Spectrum 7 and George W. Bush -- whose father was at the time vice president of the United States. Harken, run by a New York lawyer and Republican Party funder by the name of Alan Quasha, had been all over the map, buying oil wells, oil companies, and gas stationswhile selling large blocks of stock to investors such as George Soros and Harvard's Endowment Fund.Bush was a good acquisition.

Bush and his partners got $2 million in stock in exchange for Spectrum 7, which had lost $400,000 in the six months prior to the sale. "The banks hadn't foreclosed," Harken director E. Stuart Watson told Time in 1991, "but that was in the wind." Bush himself received stock worth somewhere around $500,000 and an annual consulting fee as high as $120,000. Bush is fondly remembered in Midland for getting on the phone and finding work for all of his company's management and executive employees when he finally cashed in. Again this class distinction: Those who get a golden parachute instead of a pink slip are not culpable. They didn't invent the system.

"We didn't have a fair price for oil, we just had George," Watson said later. "And George was very useful to Harken. He could have been more so if he had had funds, but as far as contacts were concerned, he was terrificÉ. It seemed like George, he knew everybody in the U.S. who was worth knowing."

If George didn't know them, they knew him. In 1990, Harken didn't strike oil, but it did strike a big deal: an exclusive 35-year exploration contract with the Persian Gulf emirate of Bahrain. The deal made no sense to anyone in the oil business. Harken was a small Texas company with no international or offshore drilling experience and, until the billionaire Bass family of Fort Worth was brought into the deal, resources nowhere near sufficient to undertake a major exploration-and-drilling program off the coast of Bahrain. "It was a surprise," a senior analyst for Petroconsultants told Time. "Harken is not traditionally a company that explores internationally."

Seven months after the Bahrain deal, the Bush administration began deploying troops to the Middle East in preparation for the Gulf War. When reporters asked W. Bush if his financial interest in the region might have influenced his father's foreign policy, he found the idea inconceivable. "No, I don't feel American troops in Saudi Arabia are preserving George Jr.'s drilling prospects," Dubya told reporters. "I think that's a little far-fetched." In all likelihood, he was right. But he got testy whenever reporters got close to what might have been driving the deal. Asked whether his involvement with Harken lent it "added credibility" in the Arab world, Bush told the Wall Street Journal: "Ask the Bahrainis."

That wasn't necessary. the journal followed Harken into the White House, where Palestinian-born investor Talat Othman of Chicago suddenly showed up on three occasions to discuss Middle East affairs with President Bush. The connection? "Mr. Othman's political access coincides with the remarkable ascendance of a little Texas oil company on whose board he serves alongside George W. Bush, the president's oldest son," the Journal reported. Othman was on the board, representing Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh of Saudi Arabia, a 17.6 percent Harken shareholder. On the eve of an American war over oil in the Middle East, Othman was invited to the White House with a small group of Arab Americans who were able to make their opinions known to the president of the United States.

In the end, it was a stock sale that created public relations problems for Dubya, which makes sense, because his oil-patch career had more to do with selling investments than drilling for oil. In June 1990 he sold two-thirds of the Harken stock he had acquired in the Spectrum 7 deal at $4 per share, for a total of $848,560 -- $318,430 more than it was worth when he got it. Two months later, Iraq invaded Kuwait and Harken's stock dropped to $3 a share. It later fell to $2.37.

Bush has repeatedly pointed to the Bahraini deal, saying that he sold "on good news." But as they say in Odessa -- Midland's sister city -- not hardly. In May, a month before he sold his stock, Bush, director E. Stuart Watson, and other members of a "fairness" committee appointed by the Harken board met to determine how restructuring would affect ordinary shareholders. One "informed source" told U.S. News & World Report that Harken's creditors had threatened to foreclose if debt payments were not made, although Harken's treasurer denied it. Smith Barney, the financial consultants Harken hired, warned Bush and Watson that only drastic action could save the company. Bush took drastic action. He unloaded his Harken stock before news of the company's precarious health was made public -- at a time, U.S. News wrote, when there was "substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits."

The reason that Bush wasn't bothered by phone calls from business reporters inquiring about his stock sale was simple: Insiders liquidating large blocks of stock are required to notify the Securities and Exchange Commission immediately. But Bush reported the sale eight months after the federal deadline. The Wall Street Journal ran a small item about Bush's late filing and said that while the SEC files civil suits against flagrant violators of insider-reporting rules, first-time violators usually get only a warning letter.

Bush didn't rob a bank or sack a savings and loan, but his unreported stock sale doesn't pass the smell test, when you consider that the SEC regulation he violated is intended to stop board members from bailing out and leaving less-informed stockholders holding an empty bag -- which is exactly what Bush did. Three years later, during his 1994 race against Ann Richards, he claimed he had filed the required report and that the SEC must have misplaced it. SEC spokesman John Heine said that no one at the agency ever found any lost document.

If Bush does make it to the White House, he and his wife Laura should haveKen Starrover for dinner. If Starr hadn't so abused the power of his office, Congress might have reauthorized the independent counsel statute, leaving the door open for a court-appointed prosecutor to investigate a president's son who flipped his oil companies faster than a Texas S&L can daisy-chain a Dallas condo; unloaded stock as a corporate board insider shortly before its price plummeted; and walked away from the whole mess with more money than Bill Clinton ever dreamed of making on a little real-estate deal now known as Whitewater.

Bush's Harken story ended in 1990. In 2000 none of it matters in Fort Worth, Dallas, or Houston. Texas loves a favorite son. We overlooked the many shortcomings of the late John Connally and cheered when patrician Tory Democrat Lloyd Bentsen reminded Danny Quayle that he was "no Jack Kennedy." We even came close to getting behind the presidential campaign of Phil Gramm, the political equivalent of kissing a toad. Now everybody loves George W. They love him even more in Midland. Just don't look for his portrait hanging in the Petroleum Hall of Fame anytime soon.

Adapted from Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, soon to be published by Random House, Inc. Copyright © 2000 by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose.