"How dare you defend Allen Stanford!" exclaimed my Washingtonian friend. She has hated fraudsters with a passion ever since she herself had been defrauded and severely abused by the Enron trader she married back in the day, of running with the rich, famous and powerful.

"I don't know if I want to be associated with anyone who would excuse that bastard," she hinted, putting our relationship at risk. "I knew Allen was a complete fraud the minute I laid eyes on him," she added.

""Please, I'm not defending Stanford. I said I'm writing about how the Miami Herald lied about Arthur Simon, the former banking director. His name should be cleared."

"I read the papers. I remember that fellow Simon signed the deal with Stanford to swindle people in Miami. Those two are partners in crime, that much was made obvious by the facts," she insisted.

"Don't believe everything you read in the Herald. The facts point to the opposite. Simon says...."

"I’ll bet Simons says,” she interjected, "Simon says this, Simon says that, but who can believe what any man says nowadays?"

"Are you saying all men are frauds?"

"No, but many if not most of them are as far as I know. Simon says he is innocent now that the watchdog has got him by the leg."

"Some watchdog. The Herald watchdog usually doesn't bark until the thieves have cleaned out the house, then it chases the spinning wheels down the street, spinning the story whichever way it thinks will grab readers and advertisers and please friends in high places. Remember, the Miami Herald is a liberal paper." I emphasized the word 'liberal' to win my friend to my side, for she is a staunch Republican.

"Oh? The Miami Herald is liberal, is it?"

"Certainly, since McClatchy bought it. McClatchy has a long liberal tradition. Didn't you read the stories and editorials on the Arizona immigration law?"

"No, but frankly, it's a good idea."

"The bottom line is the bottom line, and that's what the papers chase now, the money, so they will spin along with whatever wind happens to be prevailing at the time - the trade wind was very liberal recently but it's shifting.

"I don't like the liberal media. Its news isn't news, it's entertainment to suit the liberal ideology."

"To be fair, no big newspaper is all of a piece. A state may be a monarchy and its government republican or democratic, and vice versa."

"You're confusing me now."

"The editors of different departments of a newspaper may have differing views from one another and with the managers and owners, like at the Washington Post."

"The Post is still conservative, right? she quizzed.

"Good question. But look, you know I don't give a damn about whether someone is white or black, or a Republican or a Democrat, or professes what Adams called idiotology in a letter to Jefferson."

"Sometimes I think that's your problem. You should take a stand one way or the other."

"I'm after the truth, or at least honest expression, and the truth as I see it is that the Herald deliberately defamed this man, scapegoated and made a villain out of him. As a matter of fact, Arthur Simon’s just another Stanford victim."

"Is he a Republican?"

"I don't know. He's a Harvard man, was a Marine officer, a commander at Guantanamo."

"You don't say," she said, keenly interested now. Her family had been close to the highest military circle, and, as a Southern belle and charm school graduate, she believed in the ideal of a gallant officer and true gentleman.

"I know you," she said after some pause. You're a frustrated newspaper man. You just want to nail the Herald to the wall because it won't give you a column."

"That's right, but so what, if the nail fits? I have been suspicious of their reporting for a long time, and after I dug into the documentary evidence, and I noticed the lack of evidence in some important respects, and after I asked the Herald's top editor for evidence proving the repeated statement, that the agreement Arthur Simon signed with Stanford Trust was illegal, and I got no reply, I dearly wanted to drive a stake into the heart of the vampire."

"Sounds like you have a point to do that with," she said. "But can I say that the Miami Herald rakes the muck, and that's a good thing."

My friend relishes the exposure of powerful men - a man's power meant more to her than his fame or fortune - and she likes to see them put in their place by muckrakers if they cheat on their wives, use illegal drugs, or swindle people.

"As far as Arthur Simon is concerned, they did not rake the muck, they made it."

"How clever, I like that!" My friend's usually stern countenance broadened into a wide smile. "So the Herald investigators were not muckrakers this time, they were muckmakers."

"Correct, and people swallowed the muck they made whole, about how Simon did an illegal deal with Stanford against the advice of the chief banking counsel at the time. All that beside the stories about shredding of evidence in Miami and bags of money hauled out in private airplanes, the bribery of the head of the financial regulator agency in Antigua, bonfires to burn evidence in Antigua, and the blood-brother rituals there, gave lots of people cause to draw the inference that our former banking division director was probably corrupted too. I believed it at first, and was about to file a complaint with The Florida Bar, but then checked into the story and found it was a complete fraud."

"Really? That's incredible, but it is a liberal paper, so I'm not too surprised. He must be a Republican."

"The Herald story spread like wildfire," I continued. "The tale was embellished, like gossip normally is, by the conspiracy theorists. Just yesterday I read a report, pulled up by Google, associated Arthur Simon with a Greenberg Traurig lawyer and a Stanford house in Coral Gables, down the street from some powerful Cuban-American pal of Jeb Bush, the death of Democratic Governor Chiles, and opium production of a Bush-connected company in Afghanistan. Come to think of it, Jeb Bush is from Coral Gables."

"I don't want to hear it!" my friend snapped, for the Bush family could do no wrong in her book.

"I'm just saying that the damage to Simon's reputation has been done. Here he is, after many years of public service as a state representative and banking official, put out to farm at the university where he teaches good government, and he's being depicted as Allen Stanford's sweetheart because of the spurious Miami Herald stories. I wonder if he lives in Gables. Maybe he met with Stanford and Bush there, at the secret clubhouse...." - I like to get my friend’s goat once in awhile.

"Enough!"

"But..."

"Stop! I don't want to hear it. Let's watch TV. No, not CNN. Put on Fox News. There!"

Yes, I thought as we stared at the TV, the damage has been done, and the Herald writers even received a prestigious award for it, the Sigma Delta Chi from the Society of Professional Journalists.

-to be continued-