If private contractors insist on treating major crimes like gang rape about as seriously as using the boss’s parking space, it seems like there isn’t much incentive for the perps not to just shoot women after raping them. As long as the administration remains dead set on looking the other way while corporate chums make off with the reconstruction budget, and considering the PR problems when living victims talk to the press, where’s the downside?
Before anyone misunderstands my meaning, I don’t think much of murder as an accounting policy. The idea is inhuman and repellent, but that’s the point. Guaranteed crony contracts and minimal oversight are not just a waste of money, they create an incentive system that ensures fraud by management and crime by worker bees as inevitably as gravity pushes water downhill. Even granting that America had to knock over Saddam and park our blood and treasure in Iraq, which we didn’t, it still amazes me that the government rebuilt like a pack of morons who never hired a roofing contractor.
The absolutist kneejerk ideology that wrecked every aspect of Iraq is just part of Republican disease. It’s the basic reason why thinking conservatives like this blog’s proprietor won’t think of voting for even a seemingly reasonable Republican like John McCain. One “reasonable” guy won’t change party’s profound illness. Maybe an old-fashioned bleeding plus some fresh wilderness air will bring the patient back. Maybe even that won’t clean out DeLay corrupticons, Malkinite authoritarians and slobbering neocon torture fetishists, in which case it’s time to start shopping around for hospice care. Either way it’s gratifying to see large majorities recognizing that political power is no more in the patient’s best interest than America’s.