The Bush Adminstration and its Republican Congressional allies including Tim Murphy are fine with cronyism, corruption, insiderism and incompetence. It is clear that this is the case for they have taken no effective action to stop the structural weaknesses that allows for Republicans to line their own pockets both legally and illegally.
Instead, they revel in their lack of accountability by a demonstrated willingness to rewrite the rules of the non-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee because a majority of the Senators, including Democrats and Republicans actually want to do their jobs that they were elected to do by us; provide effective supervision of the government in order to get the best actions for the greater good possible. They also revelled in their ability to paint John Kerry as a flip-flopper for voting against a bill that gave President Bush a blank check in Iraq, while voting for a similiar bill that required President Bush to have a plan that went beyond "trust me."
This idolization of incompetence have real costs that go beyond
Duke Cunningham's (R-CA) bribery convictions for helping shady companies provide unneccessary and potentially shoddy gear to the Pentagon. It has systemic effects.
IAVA,
the blog of the successor organization to Operation Truth notes some of the costs that incompetence have given to us:
"Relatively non-existent" oversight
That is how the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction described the accounting and contracting practices of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in a recent Sixty Minutes expose. For those who missed it, you can see a transcript here or watch the video at the same CBS site, if you have the stomach. Officials describe how officials would go to the basement of the CPA and get $2 million in newly printed bills and hand it to a neophyte contractor with no paper trail. The CPA staff used the "bricks" (cellophane wrapped bills totally $100,000) as office footballs for fun.
Some of that money was from US taxpayers; some of it was from seized Iraqi assets and other "war booty." Millions are missing. That is money that is not spent on fixing the country so the troops can win hearts and minds and come home. It is also money that was not spent early on to train Iraqi troops. Several of the companies who trained the first Iraqi troops failed miserably but they still got paid.
This deliberate lack of oversight is one of the core tenets of modern Republican governance. They asked us to just "trust them." Over the past five years, the Republican Party has completely controlled the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate for 80% of the time. They have proven that this trust that they have asked for is deadly to American soldiers, residents of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast.
I will not ask you to just trust me, or to just trust the Democratic majority that we are working towards for next year. I ask you to question my actions, to examine the evidence and to bring forth new information that should change my mind. An active, informed and interacting public will produce better results for all, than a public that is led to dark alleys, and moldy swamps of the public corruption of our trust that is the Republican governing method.
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Copyright 2006