Rajiv Chandrasekaran writing for WaPo delivers a scathing critique on how Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq. Read it and then tell me how anyone with decency, integrity, or half a brain can vote Republican. One snip:
Many of those chosen by [Jim] O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.Jim O'Beirne is married to Kate O'Beirne, conservative pundit, Bush mouthpiece, Washington editor for the National Review, and neocon extraordinaire. She has a vested interest in spinning Republican propaganda as a bona fide member of the con-apparatchiki if you hadn't already ascertained why she chugs the GOP Kool-Aid.
Having read the WaPo article, Digby reasonably concluded, Before there was Katrina, there was the CPA, and then proposes:
Here's the question for the American people. Let's, for the sake of argument, say that you don't like Democrats. You have the vague feeling in the pit of your stomach that they just don't have the cojones to do "what needs to be done." You can't get over the feeling that they aren't serious enough.
But if you are a thoughtful person of any political persuasion who is concerned about national security or the economy, you simply cannot read that story above and have even the slightest faith that such people can be trusted to continue to run the government with no oversight.
The question is not whether the Democrats have a better plan to correct these grievous errors or whether they are hard enough to deal with hard issues. The question is how anyone could think Democrats could possibly be worse than an administration that ordered the US government to eschew all expertise and give billions of taxpayer dollars to inexperienced Republican functionaries to rebuild a foreign country from the ground up? Considering the stakes in all this, I don't see how anyone can think it's a good idea to let these people continue unchecked. They screw up everything they touch and they never, ever, learn from their mistakes.
I find it very hard to believe that anyone who isn't a purely faith-based voter can read this story in the Washington Post and come away believing that the Republicans are capable of running any government, much less the government of the most powerful country in the world. They are like children playing Risk and Monopoly.
If anyone thinks that political considerations will keep people like this from making more huge, irrevocable, catastrophic strategic blunders are kidding themselves. They are capable of anything. That's not hyperbole. Read the article and then bookmark it. We're going to need it to send to journalists and members of the press over the next few weeks to remind them about GOP "seriousness."Republicans complain that big government is bad and then they prove it's true through their boneheaded leadership, blatant cronyism, and failed ideology. King FUBAR and his rubber-stamp Republican Congress have turned our government into a trough for their piggies and screwed American and Iraq in the process. How can anyone in their right mind continue to vote GOP? Well, I suppose con artists who fleece American taxpayers and partisan loyalists who suckle off the US of A teat will want to keep their buddies in power, and thus, remain free of congressional oversight. You want more broken government? Vote GOP for zero accountability and continued incompetence.
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