He's gay, so you have to like him. It's the "Code of the Liberal." ;)

Seriously, rotten business practices, especially those involving mutual mixed-economy backscratching with the government, have been going on practically since Washington was President, and I doubt it would be difficult to dig up something along these lines under any administration you care to name.

You do have a certain point: Clinton set a lousy moral example for everyone, but for a grown businessman to point at him and say, for all intents and purposes, "He made me do it!" is a bit weak to say the least.

My opinion has always been that despite what Presidents would like you to believe, they probably have as much to do overall with the economy's movements as a rooster does with the sun coming up. The only positive thing a government can do to make an economy grow is to stand back, shut up, avoid looting it, and stay out of its way. Damn few are the Presidents willing to do this, although Kennedy and Reagan made a pretty good crack at it. Tax cuts can help, as can deregulation, but unless something is there to start with, nothing is going to happen. Similarly, if an economy is going to bust for a while, there probably really isn't much you can do about it. You will notice that all of Greenspan's famous Magic Interest Rate Cuts really haven't made much difference (although they cut the hell out of my adjustable mortgage payments so I ain't bitching).

I think we rode a bubble for a while in certain industries during the Clinton administration, a bubble which encouraged playing fast and loose with business speculation, accounting, and stock markets. After all, when you think the curve is going up forever, you take more chances, and pull off more tricky deals, always assuming that the pot of gold will eventually arrive and you will be able to pay the piper. If anything was encouraging shady business practices, it was the seemingly infinite growth pattern and seemingly endless supplies of incoming wealth, not Bill Clinton's moral example.

What people tend to forget about the economy is that it's strength lies in real companies that do real work, build and sell real products, and create real wealth. There are still one heck of a lot of honest firms doing just that, although they aren't making the news, and this foundation will put the rest of the economy back on track.

Pointing to Enron, Worldcom, and the others as "destroyers of our economy" is no more realistic than the example you cite, which is people calling the destruction of the WTC a physically devastating attack on our nation. Objectively speaking, and deliberately keeping emotion out of it, it was just two office buildings out of hundreds of thousands in the U.S. However, the WTC attack was definitely a devastating psychological attack on our nation, and maybe the effects of the corporate corruption in a few companies on the rest of the economy is largely psychological too.