McCain's Promise to Undo Bush

Those who ran the country into the ground for eight years sent John McCain out last night to ask voters for a do-over.

In a speech wherein the only Bush mentioned was Laura, the candidate Republicans rejected eight years ago rallied them to his cause of repairing the damage.

"I fight," he said, "to restore the pride and principles of our party. We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us.

"We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger."

McCain might have extended his indictment of the Bush years to a much longer laundry list of lies, deceit, incompetence and criminal misjudgment, but he was in the awkward position of talking over the heads of the people who had authorized all that to ask for the votes of Americans who had suffered from it.

"We're going to recover the people's trust by standing up again to the values Americans admire," McCain promised in identifying himself as a "change" candidate.

"The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan is going to get back to basics."

In his contortions, McCain tried to look forward as he kept reverting to past Republican nostrums of lower taxes, less government and individual initiative.

Tonight's McCain was not the McCain of 2000, who refused to genuflect to the Religious Right and opposed tax cuts for the richest Americans. He is now papering over all those past differences with his history of devotion and service to his country.

But he was speaking for a party he was tempted to leave in disgust at the Bush-Cheney nightmare, and it would be at their own peril if voters forgot all that, as McCain apparently has, and let him bring back the usual suspects for another four years of misusing power.

Coalition of the Willing to Be Paid

If we're failing to win hearts and minds, it's not because we're cheapskates.

Recently, the US Army paid 1,000 Iraqis $320,800 each for "Services Other Than Personal” based on one signature and no further explanation. Such largesse is cited in a new audit of $8.2 billion that finds, according to the New York Times, "almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received."

In addition, the audit showed "a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets...often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash."

“It sounds like the coalition of the willing is the coalition of the willing to be paid,” said Henry Waxman, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who yesterday introduced a “clean contracting” amendment to a defense authorization bill being debated by the House. Accepted by voice vote, it institutes reforms that include whistleblower protections and strict requirements on competitive bidding.

But such measures will come too late to stop a $5.6 million Treasury check written to pay a Baghdad trading company for items that the voucher doesn't detail or $6.2 million to another contractor with even less explanation or a scrawl on another piece of paper for $8 million, described only as “Funds for the Benefit of the Iraqi People.”

At this rate, we shouldn't have had to fight to liberate Iraq. We could have just bought it, lock, stock and oil barrel.

Stealing Surge in Iraq

Move over, Halliburton. Dick Cheney's former company has been replaced as the Texas champion of ripping off American taxpayers in the "rebuilding" of Iraq.

A report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a federal agency, finds that 8 of 11 rebuilding projects by the Parsons Corporation costing $365 million had to be stopped before completion for disastrous waste and ineptness.

The investigation was prompted by the company's $75 million construction of the Baghdad Police College, which ended up with feces and urine pouring from ceilings in student barracks, floors heaving off the ground, and water dripping profusely in a room dubbed "the rain forest."

As the U.S. military makes the country safer from insurgent attacks, American corporations are giving Iraq a taste of democracy in the sluggish, waste-ridden rebuilding of its infrastructure. Audits have found administration and overhead costs running as high as 55 percent on some projects.

In addition to its Texas connections, Parsons is one of the largest contributors to American political campaigns in the construction industry. That makes Middle East baksheesh look like small potatoes.

Winnowing the Fields in Iowa

As they get ready to do whatever it is they do, Iowans look more like they are picking prize livestock at a fair than choosing the next Leader of the Free World.

Unlike the Congressional elections of November 2006, there is less talk about Iraq, government corruption or a worrisome economy than about the candidates' character, style and commitment to "change."

Getting supporters among a fraction of the state's voters to caucus sites in the freezing cold, winning over non-supporters to become their fallback choices and placing a strong second, third or fourth are the means by which candidates will leave Iowa with a perceived victory or defeat.

They have a curious way of winnowing the fields in this heartland state.

Rudy's Albatross

The indictment today of Bernard Kerik promises to be much more than a case of a politically incorrect crony that Rudy Giuliani can fob off as easily as he has shed so much of the past in his campaign.

America's Mayor has already admitted a "mistake" in recommending his old friend for the Bush Cabinet position of Director of Homeland Security, but there are booby traps galore in the history of their post-9/11 partnership, Giuliani-Kerik, which was paid millions of dollars for advising companies, doing federal work and consulting with clients overseas.

In 2006, Giuliani's former Police Commissioner pled guilty to ethics violations after an investigation by the Bronx District Attorney's Office and was ordered to pay $221,000. Today's announcement will be, according to the New York Times, that a grand jury has voted to indict Kerik "on conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, and substantive counts of wire and mail fraud, under a statute often used in corruption cases, according to people briefed on the vote."

The unveiling of Kerik's history promises a pattern of corruption, and Giuliani is going to have to do a lot better than throwing his former partner and best friend off the bus with a political shrug.

It has opened a garbage can of worms about Giuliani's amassing of millions from his 9/11 aura with such intensity that he couldn't find time to serve on the Iraq Study Commission.

Voters are going to be asking who will protect them from the man who is promising to protect America from foreign terrorists.

Styles of Stealing: Bush and Maliki

The news today is about contrasts in corruption. In Baghdad, they do it the old-fashioned way, with Prime Minister Maliki’s friends and family taking $18 billion and then muscling or murdering those who try to expose them.

In Washington, the Bush Administration has been taking away our national morality to the point that headlines are all about crimes of character. Torturing and lying about torture is only the latest in a long list leading conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan to call his President a “war criminal” and David Brooks to accuse him of destroying the “social cohesion” that true conservatism values.

Testifying before a House panel yesterday, a former Iraqi investigator described scenes right out of our Roaring Twenties.

"They are so corrupt that they will attack their accusers and their families with guns and meat hooks, as well as countercharges of corruption," Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi testified. He recounted how one of his staff was gunned down with his seven-month-pregnant wife, his security chief's father found dead on a meat hook and another investigator’s father riddled with holes from a power drill.

Bush and Cheney have been more subtle. Senate Committees are still trying to get hold of documents that apparently condone torture while the White House was, and still is, insisting that it doesn’t.

Democrats on Capitol Hill were demanding classified memos, disclosed by the New York Times, giving the C.I.A. approval in 2005 for “harsh interrogation techniques.”

Sen. Pat Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the 2005 opinions had “reinstated a secret regime by, in essence, reinterpreting the law in secret” and his panel had been asking for those opinions on interrogation for two years without success.

Chris Matthews summed it all up succinctly yesterday: "They've finally been caught in their criminality.” But the MSNBC anchor, who will co-host a Republican candidates debate next week, may be too optimistic. Unlike the new Baghdad government, Bush and Cheney have an almost seven-year backlog of illegality waiting to be uncovered.

New Victims of 9/11

Almost six years after the Twin Towers fell, the attack has claimed two more lives and injured others, but this time the work of terrorists from the Middle East was apparently abetted by good old-fashioned home-grown crime and corruption.

Last Saturday, two Manhattan firefighters died in the partially dismantled Deutsche Bank building that had been damaged beyond repair in the 2001 disaster, and later in the week two more were injured by falling construction equipment.

Now investigators are busy trying to figure out how some of the demolition job got into the hands of companies connected with organized crime and/or no experience tearing down skyscrapers, and the finger-pointing among alphabet-soup titled agencies is likely to go on for a long time.

But then again, it took almost four years for political appointees to start looking for contractors to tear down the structurally dangerous and contaminated building before they found just the right lethally inept people for the job.

Just to add another time-warp dimension to all this, the investigation will be conducted by the office of Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney who celebrated his 88th birthday last month. Morgenthau was appointed a U.S. Attorney by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and forced out (pace Alberto Gonzales) by President Richard Nixon eight years later. Morgenthau ran for Manhattan D.A. in 1974 and has been in that office ever since.

He should know a thing or two about crooked politics by now.

ThisClose to a Banana Republic

If Democrats hadn’t taken control of Congress this year, we might be living in a third-world country under self-reinforcing Republican rule. Ultimately we have George Bush’s stupidity and stubbornness over Iraq to thank for saving us.

As Karl Rove prepares for his final bows tomorrow on Sunday morning talk shows, the House Oversight Committee leaks the latest news in his dismantling of the Hatch Act, which has barred federal employees from engaging in partisan politics since 1939.

The McClatchy newspapers report: “Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.”

This comes after revelations that the State Department, American ambassadors, the General Services Administration (which oversees government contracts) and, most infamously, U.S. Attorneys were dragooned into using their time and taxpayer money to benefit Republican office holders.

Despite all this electoral manipulation, intense and widespread public anger over Iraq and the personal corruption of Congressional Republicans gave both houses to the Democrats last November. It’s sobering to imagine how a little less hubris would have kept Bush and Rove’s lackeys in power.

As Democrats congratulate themselves for uncovering the chicanery and relish their prospects in next year’s voting, they may want to take a sober look at how much their efforts to sweep out the Augean Stables are distracting them from pressing public needs.

Nobody, especially in Washington, is immune from arrogance.

The Ghost Trial of Bush and Cheney

Sen. Patrick Leahy yesterday issued subpoenas to Karl Rove and his helper, Scott Jennings, to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee with what amounts to a prosecutor’s opening statement.

Whether or not the two Presidential aides take the stand, they will be tried as surrogates for the Bush-Cheney White House over the next months with the American public in the jury box.

Leahy, a former prosecutor, summed up the charges: “The veil of secrecy this Administration has pulled over the White House is unprecedented and damaging to the tradition of open government by and for the people that has been a hallmark of the Republic.”

Those who see the current Senate process as a counterpart of the 1970s Watergate hearings will find evidence in Leahy’s assertion, “Not since the darkest days of the Nixon Administration have we seen efforts to corrupt federal law enforcement for partisan political gain and such efforts to avoid accountability.”

Reviewing the case against Rove in the U.S. Attorney firings, Leahy claimed that “evidence points to his role and the role of those in his office in removing or trying to remove prosecutors not considered sufficiently loyal to Republican electoral prospects. Such manipulation shows corruption of federal law enforcement for partisan political purposes.”

To underscore Bush’s “stonewalling,” Leahy cited 74 instances of Presidential advisors testifying before Congress since World War II, adding that, during the Clinton years, White House aides were “routinely subpoenaed for documents or to appear before Congress.”

He broadened his case about the lawlessness of the current Administration by noting “political briefings at over 20 government agencies, including briefings attended by Justice Department officials” and the revelation this week that U.S. ambassadors were similarly drawn into domestic politics.

As Leahy launched the case against Bush and Cheney, the committee’s senior Republican, Arlen Specter, was hitching a ride on Air Force One and telling reporters that while he hoped “to reach an accommodation” with the White House on the subpoenas, “I don’t see it now.”

As in the time of Watergate, the American public will be listening and making up its mind about the innocence or guilt of its White House employees.