From The Herald Tribune
By Daryl Lease

I’ll confess my knee jerked liberally when I read that Exxon Mobil’s recently retired CEO Lee Raymond received more than $686 million in salary and other compensation over the past 13 years.

At first glance, his total haul — equivalent to $144,573 a day — struck me as just a wee bit excessive.

Looked the same on the second and third glance, actually.

But if I’ve learned anything from Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Rove Inc. these last few years, it’s that you have to glance at nonsense again and again — stare it down, really — before what they’re telling you starts to make any sense at all.

So, by the time I glanced at the size of Lee’s haul 144,573 times, the whole deal started to look more like a bargain.

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