Michelle Malkin has an excellent piece on the bipartisan Katrina boondoggle. That is, the billions of dollars wasted on behalf of the Hurricane Katrina victims.
Malkin points out:
Federal investigators now estimate the total for Hurricane Katrina waste could exceed $2 billion next year. Some $1 billion in aid has already been squandered on everything from unused trailers to empty cruise ship cabins, junkets, and disaster aid debit cards that covered strip club and champagne expenses. Investigators reportedly will release the first of several audits examining more than $12 billion in Katrina contracts next month.
But when the Democrats take control of Congress next month and start their "oversight" (read: Republican bashing), it is doubtful that they will be concerned about $68,000 for dog booties or the $5.3 million FEMA gave away to registrants claiming P.O. boxes as their addresses. Nope. they'll focus on big companies with GOP ties.
When they hold their windy hearings and press conferences decrying wastefraudandabuse, they'll bray about countless hurricane contractors with GOP ties. They'll turn over the microphone to corporate shakedown hypocrites such as Jesse Jackson to moan about favoritism in government contracting. And they'll assail the Republican culture of corruption while looking the other way at Katrina's Democrat profiteers.
You will hear a lot about the Shaw Group, for example, which snapped up major disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Mainstream media outlets and Democrat mau-mauers have zeroed in on Shaw's "ties to the Bush White House" and the multibillion-dollar conglomerate's status as a "major corporate client of Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency."
But then, there's always a flip side to all these stories.
What Nancy Pelosi and company will not mention, though, is that the Shaw Group was founded by major Louisiana Democrat player Jim Bernhard -- a former chairman of the Louisiana Democrat Party who worked tirelessly for Democrat Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco's runoff campaign and served as co-chair of her transition team. Bernhard was palsy-walsy with Blanco, whom he has lent/offered the Shaw Group's corporate jets to on numerous occasions. Another Shaw executive was Blanco's campaign manager.
Whenever I get accused of being a partisan hack because I love pointing at Democrat hypocrisy, I just pull out stories like this one. All skullduggery is bipartisan. The quicker the real partisan hacks (those who think only Republicans run big businesses) realize that the muck runs deep, the sooner we can start cleaning up the messes they leave.
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