Halliburton

Reading James Ridgeway's piece today on why the government won't release the Katrina documents, I started to rethink the whole notion that this is a government run by crooks and liars. Ridgeway argues that the papers will reveal what everyone knows (I mean really knows, not tinfoil hat "knows"), that the feds knew Katrina was coming but didn't want to interrupt their golf games to do anything about it. Halliburton; Kellogg, Brown & Root; and Fluor, all big contributors to The Party are profiting handsomely:

The long and the short of it is that Katrina, like Iraq, has been a cash cow for Bush's entrepreneur buddies. Congress has approved $62.3 billion for Katrina relief efforts so far. And that's only the beginning.

And this is where I had the realization that Bush's whole strategy seems to be to welcome or cause chaos--start a war, don't do anything about an impending natural disaster, and so on--and then divvy up the mop-up spoils. It's like a weird chaos-induced WPA for people who are already stinking rich. Which brings me to my epiphany: This is not a government by thieves and liars; it's a government by janitors.