Matt Bevins: A Bush in Bed With Beijing?

Check the link near the bottom of the article about New Bridge Strategies -- a company set up this year by a bunch of Bush family friends and allies, and chaired by George W. Bush's 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh --in order to "take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the U.S.-led war in Iraq."

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It's an old game but still always instructive, so imagine a brother of Bill or Hillary Clinton was revealed to have been romping about Southeast Asia with prostitutes -- sorry, with odd women who "simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and had sex with him" -- and also caught climbing into bed with a company run by the son of the former president of China.

Do you have a good mental picture of how that sleazy brother-of-Clinton would be handled by the media, the political classes and the public?

Good. Now consider the case of Neil Bush -- the former president's son, current president's brother -- whose frank admissions in court testimony to screwing around in Thailand and Hong Kong, and taking huge sums of money from Chinese political players for murky services, are somehow barely even news -- much less front-page, what-the-heck, what-does-Congress-think news.

Legal documents filed in the divorce of Neil and Sharon Bush (after 23 years of marriage) show that Bush had a contract with a three-year-old company backed by the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. His pay was to be $400,000 a year. His duties? Even less clear than his qualifications. (The brother of the president of the United States accepting $400,000 a year at the pleasure of the son of the president of China -- and also lacking the common sense to turn away legions of strange women at his door offering sex -- smacks, frankly, of a tremendous national security problem.)

http://www.thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?bid=6