The Bush family's Dubai connections

There was a peculiar story in the news on Wednesday about former first lady Barbara Bush. The Houston Chronicle reported that the president's mother donated money to the Bush-Clinton Houston Hurricane Relief Fund on the condition that it be used for one purpose and one purpose only.

She wanted the money to be spent on educational software from Ignite Learning, a company owned by her son Neil.

The educational software costs $10,000 per school.

Wait, it gets better.

Neil Bush founded Ignite Learning in 1999, just as his brother was getting ready to run for president, with money from investors in Dubai.

This fact was reported in the Houston Chronicle after Neil's son, Pierce G. Bush, went to the trouble of writing a letter to the editor of the Chronicle complaining about the firestorm over Dubai Ports World's purchase of operations at six U.S. ports. Pierce, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, said the criticism of the ports deal sent an "ignorant and offensive" message and appeared to be "racially prejudiced."

Pierce told the Chronicle he was personally familiar with Dubai. He said he had visited the emirate with his father, whose educational software company, Ignite Learning, had investors in the United Arab Emirates.

Pierce insisted that his opinions had nothing to do with his father's business interests.

That still leaves the fact that Barbara Bush used a tax-deductible contribution to a disaster victims' fund fronted by her husband to pad the bottom line of her son's business. Did she perhaps hope to give the company some much-needed visibility that could be leveraged into improved sales nationwide?

In fact, Barbara Bush did make a personal appearance at Fleming Middle School in Houston on Thursday to showcase the software in use.

Without knowing the names of Ignite Learning's UAE investors, it won't be possible to track the contributions by those individuals to Bush family projects, like the former president's library at Texas A&M, although the Associated Press did report that the UAE and one of its sheikhs contributed at least a million dollars to the Bush Library Foundation before 1995.

The current President Bush is now considering proposals for his own presidential library. He has put his brother Marvin and his old friend Don Evans in charge of finding the site for the library and the estimated $500 million it will take to build it.

Would you believe it, the United Arab Emirates happens to be a big fan of presidential libraries. The donations from that country to the Clinton Library totaled between $500,000 and $1 million.

Hey, what's a guy supposed to do if he needs to raise half a billion dollars to build his presidential library? Hold a bake sale?

Of course, Neil Bush's little software company is hardly a honey pot of profits for investors in the UAE. It's more likely a conduit for clients to pay the presidential brother for influence peddling. That's what this paragraph from the March 25 Associated Press report seems to indicate:

Two years ago, the Houston school district board wrestled with conflict of interest concerns over the Ignite program. Neil Bush had helped raise $115,000 for the district's philanthropic fund from donors who insisted the money be spent on his company's software.

Let's be honest, why would the donors demand that their money be given to Neil Bush unless they were paying him for a service rendered? If the software was really all that unique and indispensable, Microsoft would have bundled it with Windows by now.

No doubt the Bush family feels that they have sacrificed greatly for the United States and should not have their motives questioned just because they appear to be risking U.S. port security and wasting scarce school district dollars in order to throw business to wealthy foreign donors and grasping family members.

Damn that First Amendment. Where's John Ashcroft when you need him?

Copyright 2006

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