Oil for Food Scandal Sleight of Hand

While wingnuts scream ever louder for UN head Kofi Annan to resign, I keep thinking how this scandal sadly pales in comparison to virtually every horror the Bushies put forth.

Give me Kofi over Dick, Donny, and DumDum any day. And I’d rather just force Norm Coleman (Mr. Plastic Surgery and Grecian Formula) to resign. He’s an embarrassment.

This, however, is not to say that I’m all all happy about the Oil-for-Food Scandal. But we knew this crap was going on in the 1990s folks. And it’s not just all this Annan business either.

Under Bush I, under Clinton, and under Bush II until Bush II decided to make Iraq fall down and go boom. There were tales and video of Saddam’s son at these ports where foreign tankers were there to fill up with oil that would go out to other countries. There was some indication that companies and interests within the US (hmmm… air smells oily) were very happy to take Hussein’s purloined revenue to sell Iraq stuff we really weren’t supposed to sell. If you’re doing anything with fuel, there’s a very good chance you’ll be buying various controls and equipment if not outright services from…the likes of Halliburton. (And wasn’t Rummy with Bechtel just before Bush II tapped him?)

So yes, that money was purloined is awful. But it’s not just awful if you’re a black man named Annan doing it. It’s bad when it’s done by fat white men with Texas accents, too.

And if you want to discuss nepotism, let’s do that. We’ll invite Neil and Marv Bush, plus Uncle Jonathan Bush, plus the Cheney daughters’ lucrative contracts with the government for things in which they have no qualification, and how Rehnquist’s daughter was a freak who protected Jeb Bush’s plump ass over nursing home horrors and insisted on packing heat wherever she went. And that’s just for starters.

I don’t like nepotism of any shade – black or white, red or blue. I don’t like policies that are ignored to make sitting officials in the US government far richer when their tenure with looting and pillaging of the US is done. I don’t like corruption when it’s them or when it’s us (Halliburton, Enron, Bechtel, Unocal, Carlisle Group, Bin Laden Associates, et al).