The reverse Midas touch in action. Everything the GOP gets its hands on turns into a mess. International relations? Disaster. Iraq? Don't even ask. Earmarks 'til the cows come home and padding personal wealth? Where do we start? With total control over all three branches of the government in DC, the GOP has ruined FEMA so badly and now taxpayers are looking at paying the price (again) for GOP incompetence to the tune of a few billion dollars. Wow. There is no one to blame when the GOP owns everything.
If you want more of the same - more failed wars, more special interests, more scandals, more destroyed government programs - you should continue voting for the GOP. More of the same means more incompetence:
A hotel owner in Sugar Land, Tex., has been charged with submitting $232,000 in bills for phantom victims. And roughly 1,100 prison inmates across the Gulf Coast apparently collected more than $10 million in rental and disaster-relief assistance.There are the bureaucrats who ordered nearly half a billion dollars worth of mobile homes that are still empty, and renovations for a shelter at a former Alabama Army base that cost about $416,000 per evacuee.
And there is the Illinois woman who tried to collect federal benefits by claiming she watched her two daughters drown in the rising New Orleans waters. In fact, prosecutors say, the children did not exist.
The tally of ignoble acts linked to Hurricane Katrina, pulled together by The New York Times from government audits, criminal prosecutions and Congressional investigations, could rise because the inquiries are under way. Even in Washington, a city accustomed to government bloat, the numbers are generating amazement.
