March 4, 2007, It's about the Benjamins
In the Bush Administration, it seems it's never, ever about anything else. For those inclined to blame Joe Lieberman for everything, feel free: he just sat there during the Vice-Presidential debate in 2000 and let Dick Cheney lie through his teeth about the government "having nothing to do" with his inconceivably good financial fortune as head of government parasite corporation Halliburton. And so, over six wonderful years later, the mirth and merriment (for those of us uncomfortable with technical terms like "graft") just keeps on coming.
We'll start with this WaPo report indicating that the Bush FDA is approving-- over the objections of a technical committee it convened, not to mention the AMA, doctors, the World Health Organization and just about everyone who doesn't stand directly to make money off of this-- a powerful antibiotic to treat cattle respiratory problems, even though it is widely feared that this will inevitably result in drug resistant strains jumping over to humans, rendering some of the last lines of antibiotic defense... useless. You know: this will probably kill people. A lot of people. But we don't know who they are, and even if we did, it's not like they hire lobbyists, or make deposits in numbered Swiss bank accounts, or hire ex-Administration officials for cushy jobs with expense accounts, now do they?
Similarly, the military was in a quandary over the whole Walter Reed thing that (Congress is about to start harumphing and investigating, starting with General Kiley, the Army's top doc). Why, we wonder, are we doing such a piss-poor job treating those veterans who used to be those troops we cared so much about that we sent them to Iraq without adequate body armor and equipment in the first place ("you go to war with the hapless schmucks Army you have, not with the Army you wish you have")? That's not exactly a hard one: there are no defense contractors standing by to bribe contract officers, hire brass for revolving door jobs or hire lobbyists to treat the wounded stateside, now are there? The Benjamins that are there to build new weapons systems and aircraft and ships and shit for the cool services (Navy and Air Force) just aren't there for treating the wounded grunts in the Army and Marines... sorry, guys. (To be fair, it's not as if a lot of Americans don't get miserable health care, now is it?)
And the City of New Orleans has sued the Army Corps of Engineers for $77 billion, having concluded that the Corps' construction of levies that were not up to a hurricane the size and magnitude of Katrina led to the destruction of large parts of the city, and seeing if the courts will see it the same way... of course, New Orleans is a city with a lot of poor people many of whom are Of Color... it's not as if they were in a position to spread the Benjamins around to make sure that their levies were adequately funded by the federal government, now was it? Of course, as the great humanitarian Newt Gingrich just said, "How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane?"
Yessirree folks... like I was saying, in George W. Bush's America, it's the people who don't have the Benjamins who are always at fault. Newt certainly agrees with that wholeheartedly, as did the cheering conservatives to whom he addressed his remarks. So it must be true.