Spine Watch

While clowns like Joe Lieberman continue to reveal their inner jellyfish, a few Democrats are doing their best to demonstrate how opposition to Team Bush actually leads to...well, if not upright walking, at least inclusion in the order of vertebrates.

You know, it's not like it actually takes MUCH in the way of backbone...the John Murtha position, as he's all but literally spelled out, is simply a reflection of the goddamned Pentagon, minus the political appointee morons. Sure, wingnuts who don't even qualify as pathetic excuses of insectia, much less human beings, have tried their tired smear routine without really grasping the underlying meaning of Murtha's statements (grasping must be "hard work" for them, even with six limbs...and antennae).

Points of interest in the transcript above were already noted by Think Progress, including, once again, more supplementals to the defense budget for war operations--$50 billion already on the table, another $100 billion for next year, which might partially explain administration foot dragging on reconstruction right here--and lord only knows what sort of oversight...speaking of: Henry Waxman (D-CA) noted the following discrepencies in previous war spending, which makes me think the new round of money will similarly have...no accounting for at all:

Large government contractors like Halliburton have repeatedly overcharged the taxpayer. Auditors at the Defense Contract Audit Agency have identified over $1.4 billion in unreasonable and unsupported charges by Halliburton in Iraq. Whistleblowers have testified about $100 bags of laundry, $45 cases of soda, and brand new $85,000 trucks being abandoned because of a flat tire. Yet the Administration refuses to take action. Last month, the Defense Department paid Halliburton $130 million in reimbursements, profits, and bonuses for billings that the department's own auditors recommended against paying.

The Bush Administration's management of the reconstruction of Iraq has been fundamentally incompetent. Billion-dollar contracts were awarded with little or no competition to favored contractors. Competition for discrete reconstruction projects was suppressed by dividing Iraq into a handful of fiefdoms and awarding lucrative monopoly contracts to companies that never had to compete against each other for specific reconstruction tasks.

Between May 2003 and June 2004, U.S. officials shipped nearly $12 billion in cash to Iraq. As government audits later found, the cash was spent and disbursed by U.S. officials with virtually no financial controls or reliable accounting. The Administration cannot account for over $8 billion that was transferred to Iraqi ministries. This unsupervised flood of cash into Iraq became an open invitation to corruption. A senior U.S. official already has been charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks from a U.S. contractor in exchange for steering up to $3.5 million in fraudulent contracts his way. Government investigators have said that there are dozens of other criminal corruption cases being processed.

And Congress waxes piously about LOUISIANA corruption? Huey, Earl, and the Old Regulars COMBINED wouldn't come close.

Oh--and back to Murtha--he's got some news for those who, like Slow Joe L., worry about administration "credibility:"

QUESTION: Mr. Murtha, what do you say to Senator Lieberman whom yesterday said Democrats need to acknowledge that this president is commander in chief for three more years, that undermining his credibility...

MURTHA: Undermining his credibility? What has he said that would give him credibility?

He said there was Al Qaida connection. He said there was a connection with nuclear weapons. He said there's biological, chemical weapons there. He said there's progress now. I'm showing you that I don't see the kind of progress he sees.

I'll tell you what they're saying to me when they call. It's refreshing. We're seeing some honesty about this thing.

Now, I don't know that you could call them dishonest but it certainly is not -- the public is not buying it and they've changed their mind, I think, because they feel that they've been misled.

Exactly--and for the life of me, I can't fathom why ANY Democratic politician would allow themselves to be led around on a leash held by Karl Rove. No matter how much he'll claim about everything being "in the national interest," the fact is he--and his party--will jerk on the choke chain early, often, and at every opportunity. That's WHY the war resolution debate came up when it did, that's WHY Big Time ominously questions the patriotism of anyone NOT allowing themself to be put on an administration leash, and that's WHY the entire agenda of this administration is full of shit: they're NOT governing in the national interest, and they NEVER have. Everything is all politics, all the time to them.

It might win elections, but it makes for horrible administration--as anyone who's seen the Gulf Coast now knows.