Villainy from a master.

Corruption is Decider George’s real middle name — along with a nasty form of depravity named Karl Rove — and this innate form of life has spilled over into Iraq, an original corrupt state, where pocketing US cash has become a habit.

In a war started with lies, the only recourse would be to continue the corruption of truth, the old fox and the hen-house routine only in billions of dollars.
Not long after ‘shock and awe,’ the new US protectorate managed to loose $12 billion, some of it delivered out the tailgate of a pick-up truck.

(Illustration found here).

And from Radio Free Europe this morning:

• Iraq has charged more than 300 officials with corruption this year and courts handed down 86 convictions, its corruption watchdog has said, as a nation awash in oil money fought back against graft.
  Iraq is perceived as being the world’s third most corrupt country, with only failed state Somalia and Myanmar’s military junta below it, according to the Transparency International index measuring perceptions of graft in 180 nations.

Last June, a BBC investigation revealed near $23 billion has been lost or otherwise, in so many words, mishandled or stolen by US contractors doing business in Iraq, which doesn’t include the nearly 200,000 weapons — pistols, AK-47s, to machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades — discovered to be unaccounted for, or simply, just “missing.”
Not only has Decider George’s Iraqi adventure a failure, but it’s made a terrible problem worse, opening boils of corruption, creating an even-more easy environment for graft, which can lead to bankrolling insurgents, or engender a kind of ironic blow back — Blackwater, the private pro-protector provider, is being investigated for smuggling weapons into Iraq by secreting them in dog food, placing the weapons “on the inside of pallets next to the dog food bags to prevent corrupt foreign customs agents and shipping workers from stealing them.”
A good smuggling operation can be sorely hampered by corruption.

However, what’s one to do about it?

According to the New York Times yesterday:

• The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is systematically dismissing Iraqi oversight officials, who were installed to fight corruption in Iraqi ministries by order of the American occupation administration, which had hoped to bring Western standards of accountability to the notoriously opaque and graft-ridden bureaucracy here.
  …
  One Iraqi former chief investigator recently testified before Congress that $13 billion in reconstruction funds from the United States had been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste by Iraqi government officials.
  …
  Mr. Maliki’s stance on oversight was most vividly illustrated by his long-running feud with Judge Rathi al-Rathi, the former head of the Commission on Public Integrity, an oversight agency created by the Coalition Provisional Authority.
  After Mr. Rathi’s corruption investigations repeatedly embarrassed the Maliki government, the prime minister’s office supported corruption charges against Mr. Rathi himself.

  Mr. Rathi’s backers considered the charges to be trumped-up.
  Ultimately, Mr. Rathi was forced out and fled Iraq in the summer of 2007, saying he had received numerous threats to his life.
  He was recently granted asylum in the United States, said Chris King, a former United States Embassy official who was a senior adviser to the integrity commission.

Nuri learned from one of the best.
Decider George’s administration might be one of the most corrupt — in fact, he’s the fourth ranked most corrupt, behind Ulysses Grant, Warren Harding and Dick Nixon, according to mostcorrupt.com, although Rolling Stone tapped him the “Worse President in History” two years ago.
The last near-eight years has been termed corruption on steroids, from Jack Abramoff and Alberto Gonzales to torture lies, or just plain lying or just plain old incompetence.
All this leading to a mounting pressure on President-Elect Obama to investigate all kinds of bad shit from the Bush White House.

And Decider George’s Rovian influence might end up biting him on the ass.
Time last Friday:

• Next month in Atlanta, a federal court will hear the high-profile appeal of former Alabama governor Don E. Siegelman, whose conviction on corruption charges in 2006 became one of the most publicly debated cases to emerge from eight years of controversy at the Bush Justice Department.
  Now new documents highlight alleged misconduct by the Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney and other prosecutors in the case, including what appears to be extensive and unusual contact between the prosecution and the jury.

Forrest Gump’s mama used to say, ‘Stupid is as stupid does.’