Maureen Dowd's Fuzzy Math

If there is a lazier and more ignorant op ed writer in America than Maureen Dowd of the New York Times I would like someone to point that person out to me. No, actually I wouldn't. To have to suffer through a column worse than the dreck that Maureen throws together with what appears to be little research or forethought might just be enough to push me over the edge. A recent piece that appeared on July 10th featured such creative and original thinking as this:

"And they are hounded by the same old question they have designed their lives to avoid: Can a Bush--born on third base but thinking he hit a triple--ever really understand the problems of the guys in the bleachers?"

I think I first heard the "born on third thinking he hit a triple" back in the 2000 primaries and I'm sure it was used against Bush way back in his days as governor of Texas. Is this the best Maureen can give us?

She then proceeds to talk about Bush's Harken stock deal which she compares to Hillary Clinton's dubious commodity investment:

How can Mr. Bush lecture companies on setting a moral tone, getting tough on accounting practices and ending "malfee-ance," as he calls it, when there are pesky questions about his own windfall at Harken Energy? (His $848,560 stock cash-in made Hillary, the Cattle Queen of commodities trading, look like a piker for only taking home $100,000.)

Without even getting in to the facts behind both deals which hardly seem comparable, Maureen's simplistic view that since the gross on Bush's stock sale was higher it is inherently somehow worse than Hillary's is absurd. Bush received approximately $500,000 of Harken stock in 1986 when Harken purchased Spectrum 7 another energy firm which Bush ran. In 1990 he sold his shares of Harken for $848,560 for a gain of $348,560. I'm hardly a financial wizard but that works out to something like a 69% return on the original $500k. Hillary meanwhile invested a paltry $1000 on her commodity deal which she almost immediately turned around and sold for $100,000 a gain of $99,000 or a return of 9900%. Hmmm... Which deal seems more suspicious?