Daily News

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Today’s 500+ page report tells us how badly the reconstruction effort has gone in Iraq. It seems that the Bush Administration has poured more than $117 billion, including $50 billion of U.S. taxpayer money, essentially down a rathole. Is there no end to their incompetence?

According to a report by the New York Times that was printed in today’s Wichita Eagle, we not only have not rebuilt Iraq, “the U.S. government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.”

In other words, we started out doing it wrong and we haven’t learned from our mistakes and set things up so we can do it right in the future.

Most of the original fault for this lies with officials in the Pentagon, but where was the oversight from the Republican Congress? There are those who think Republicans can’t govern because they think government is a bad thing. It’s certainly a bad thing in their hands.

I think the current bunch of Republicans can’t govern because they can’t see beyond the “What’s in it for me?” attitude that makes them so eager to blow up an industry critical to the economic health of our country just to eviscerate a union they don’t like.

I suspect it’s that same attitude that led them to allow Lehmann Brothers to go into bankruptcy. After all, Lehmann Brothers was the only major financial institution that actually made political contributions to Democratic candidates. They contributed to Republican candidates, too, but this current group isn't interested in being fair -- only in taking revenge, that being how they define winning.

You’d think they would have learned from the results of that decision, but there are days I’m not sure they are capable of learning anything. Today's one of them.

I wonder what the news will bring us tomorrow?
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