Fighting Government Greed

Guest Post by Doctor Snedley, Personal Assistant to Doctor Biobrain

In a perfect liberal world, everyone would just read the headlines and pretend that the rest of the article provided some sort of proof of the wild claims made in the headline.  Or maybe they’d skim the headlines looking for a story that interested them and then read the story to uncover details that were suggested in the headline.  And then what?  And then nothing.  They’d just absorb the “story” and “facts” being told by the journalist and move on to the next story.  Sound familiar?

But what about what the reporter didn’t write about?  What about the details that didn’t get mentioned?  Like this wild headline: Auditors: Billions squandered in Iraq.  

Now what does that suggest to you?  It suggests that we wasted a whole bunch of money fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq and how we need to punish Bush for it.  As if Bush wasted that money.  Forget about the fact that Bush was nowhere near Iraq when that money got squandered; everything’s his fault because some lib journalist says it is.  And why?  Because some contractor was smart enough to outwit some dumb government employee.  Like Bush invented fraud or something.

Geography 101

And if you read the article, you don’t get a much different picture.  Like this sentence: So far, the Bush administration has spent more than $350 billion on the Iraq war and reconstruction effort.

The Bush Administration spent??  The Bush Administration spent??  I don’t know what planet this reporter is from, but on my planet the Bush Administration is headquartered in a little place called Washington D.C., in a building called The White House.  And unless my online correspondence courses have let me down, The White House isn’t even close to Iraq.  Easily a thousand miles apart.  And they get their own budget with their own spending parameters.  And none of that includes Iraq.  So unless the “Bush Administration” has figured out some way to spend money a thousand miles away, I think this reporter has got some splainin’ to do.

And what’s the “so far” bit all about?  It’s not enough that they accuse the Bush Administration of spending money that they clearly never touched.  But there’s that lead-in to suggest that they’ll be spending a whole bunch more.  As if it’s impossible that Al Qaeda might just finally decide to give-up and announce they were going back to the sand dunes they arose from.  Or that there was just no way that everything in Iraq could fix itself tomorrow and start pumping that “wasted” money right back to us.  No.  In liberal-weirdo reporterland, everything in Iraq is unsolvable and will keep getting worse.  And it’s no wonder things are so bad, with that attitude.

And that’s the way the whole thing is written.  The headline suggests that lots of money is wasted in Iraq, and the article gives details which back-up that claim.  In fact, there isn’t even one fact in the article that doesn’t back-up that claim.  Pretty suspicious, huh.

The Big Picture

But what’s missing from this story?  What else: The Big Picture.  Sure, lots of money was wasted in Iraq and there weren’t proper controls and lots of fraud occurred.  But what did they expect?  Conservatives have been railing against government regulations for the past forty years.  Did they think we were joking?  Did they think we only meant that we didn’t like it when liberals enforced the rules?  Hell no.  We’re against all government red-tape and “regulations” and “oversight” and all that other mean and nasty stuff the liberals invented to stifle the human spirit.

Yet this article makes no mention of that at all, but instead makes it seem as if this was a sign that something went wrong.  But this isn’t wrong.  This was the plan, and the plan has worked magnificently.  $350 billion spent in Iraq, and the government has only been able to pinpoint a mere 3% of that as fraud.  Back in the day, they’d have found much more fraud than that.  Hell, they might have stopped it before it even happened.  But instead, most of this fraud got off scot-free; in some cases, it was totally untraceable.  That’s the free-market at its finest.

And lest you think that this fraud somehow conflicts with conservative demands for fiscal responsibility, then you just haven’t been paying attention.  Because what that lib reporter failed to mention (as he was told to fail to mention, no doubt), was that all that oversight costs money.  This reporter would have you believe that government oversight is performed by pixies with magic adding machines who work for nothing but the joy of stifling entrepreneurs.  But reality gives us an entirely different picture: Jack-booted accountants who would rather spit in a business’s eye than to look the other way to help them prosper.  Typical.

Begetting Wealth

According to some estimates, traditional government oversight functions in Iraq would have cost ten or fifteen times as much as the amount that was “wasted” in Iraq.  That’s using the old-school liberal oversight techniques.  So they would have tossed-away $100 billion just to save a meager $10 billion. Now that changes the picture quite a bit, doesn’t it?  Rather than these government contractors being part of some Bush conspiracy to turn the American taxpayer into some sort of cash cow, we see them instead as heroes, helping save $10 for every dollar they take.  That’s real money, my friend.  Is it any wonder that the reporter failed to mention this?

But the savings don’t stop there.  Rather than this money going to some faceless bureaucrat to toss down the moneyhole; this money goes to contractors who really know how to use it.  They don’t toss it away or stuff it in a fatcat mattress in Washington.  Hell no.  In their hands, this money filters on down the chain, ending up in the pockets of subcontractors and cronies.  It becomes kickbacks and bribes, and swimming pools and yachts.  It accumulates interest and purchases competitors.  This money is put to work.   And whatever’s leftover?  Right back into GOP coffers, where it kicks off the whole cycle all over again.  And that’s the sweetest part of all: Wealth begets wealth.

So let the liberals have their biased media, and damning headlines, and facts that would make any good liberal scream in disgust; and we’ll keep showing them what capitalism is really about.  It’s not about stealing money from taxpayers or forcing honest businessmen to follow “rules” that were only intended to make them dishonest in the first place.  And it’s certainly not about soulless bureaucrats pushing pencils and redtape.  This is about good, old-fashioned money making; and that’s exactly what made our country so great.  

And in that context, George Bush isn’t some incompetent flake with an out of control war; he’s an economic mastermind with the guts to make it work.  And the proof of the rightness of that is evidenced by the fact that no liberal reporter would ever write about it.  They can have their bias; I’ll take the cash.  Proud to be an American!