In the discussion about the Abramoff scandal, people have mentioned the K-Street Project’s goals of funneling money to Republican candidates and providing golden parachutes for ex-GOP congressmen and their staffers, but amid the outrage about media outlets repeatedly making the false claim that this is a bipartisan scandal one important point is being missed. The key point of the K-Street Project wasn’t just its boosting of Republicans, but its insistence that Democrats not be allowed to share in the spoils. In short, this is a Republican scandal because the GOP insisted that Democrats not be allowed to sit at the grownup’s table. That’s not to say that Democrats are above corruption by any means, just that in this case the Republicans went out of their way to ensure that these avenues to bribery were only available to Republicans.
Kitten survey
August has just ensured that when they start rounding up cartoonists, his name will be higher on the list than mine.
Clusterfuck
The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.
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Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding.
“It almost looks like a spoils system between various agencies,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president and an authority on the Army corps at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization in Washington, who read a copy of the document. “You had various fiefdoms established in the contracting process.”
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Until January 2003, reconstruction planning was conducted in secrecy “to avoid the impression that the U.S. government had already decided on intervention,” the draft history says. Possibly as a result, the American administrative authority arrived with no written plans or strategies for purchasing and contracting and no personnel with expertise in the area.
More coincidences
White House counselor Dan Barlett said Monday that Bush’s photographs in the company of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff amount to a coincidence and shouldn’t be interpreted any more seriously than that.
Other photographic coincidences:
1. Picture of Abramoff putting $100 bills into Bush’s g-string with his teeth
2. Picture of Abramoff handing Bush an oversized novelty check for $1 million with memo line reading “bribe”
3. Picture of Abramoff with Bush, inscribed: “To Jack—thanks for the bribe!”
4. Picture of Dan Bartlett with Bush, inscribed: “To Dan—thanks for lying about my sordid relationship with Jack Abramoff!”
5. Twenty year-old picture of Abramoff shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad.
Update from Tom: as luck would have it, I was able to track down one of the photos Jonathan mentions. Somebody tell Drudge.
Conservative and with a duck
Greg’s new rainy day fun game, repurposing Mallard Fillmore strips, reminds me of the time I was at a conference of editorial page editors, back in the early nineties, and met an editor — I’m pretty sure she was from the Washington Times — who was one of that strip’s earliest champions. Her description of Mallard Fillmore remains lodged in my mind: “It’s like Doonesbury — but conservative and with a duck!
I don’t know why that still makes me smile, but it does.