Curbside Pickup

White House Trash

Biohazard, in Iraq, the model country for Team Bush-style governance, has a whole different meaning:

Sabah al-Atia sometimes calls home every 10 minutes when he is working to let his wife know he is still alive. After all, his job is one of the most dangerous in the city.

Mr. Atia is a trash collector.

In a city where a bomb could be lurking beneath any heap of refuse, and where insurgents are willing to kill to prevent them from being discovered, an occupation that pays only a few dollars a day has become one of the deadliest. Most of the 500 municipal workers who have been killed here since 2005 have been trash collectors, said Naeem al-Kaabi, the city’s deputy mayor.

“When we are working, we are working nervously,” said Mr. Atia, 29, who started collecting trash during Saddam Hussein’s rule. “We are carrying our souls in our hands.”

The danger to trash collectors is at the root of one of the most visible symptoms of collapse in Baghdad. Garbage is ubiquitous, especially in dangerous neighborhoods, blanketing street medians, alleys and vacant lots in stinking, fly-infested quilts. Trash collection has joined a long list of basic services, including electricity, water and sewerage, that have slipped badly in many places since the American-led invasion.

Trash collectors have frequently refused to venture into especially problem-plagued Baghdad neighborhoods, including Dora, Adhamiya, Jamiya and Ghazaliya, where spasms of violence have often been the norm. Or they have dashed in and out when the danger ebbed, hauling away what they could.

Hey, I think I've got a solution: take the entire executive branch, along with their apologists, enablers, supporters, or anyone else of the wingnut persuasion, and put THEM to work as trash collectors in Iraq...if they somehow manage to make it through unscathed, then they can get to work doing the same along the Gulf Coast. Call their Mesopotamian experience sort of an internship/educational experience...and the fruit of their "hard work."

Update: Oh, I meant to include this wonderful sentence from the enablers of record, aka Pravda on the Hudson:

Trash collection has joined a long list of basic services, including electricity, water and sewerage, that have slipped badly in many places since the American-led invasion.

Ya think?