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“This administration is populated by people who’ve spent their careers bashing government. They’re not just small-government conservatives—they’re Grover Norquist, strangle-it-in-the-bathtub conservatives. It’s a cognitive disconnect for them to be able to do something well in an arena that they have so derided and reviled all these years.”

Senator Hillary Clinton

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Off the deep end

I know I shouldn't:
In all of human history there is nothing quite as disgusting as the UN's Oil for Food scandal...

Alright, I'll bite. I would have thought that 9/11 would be more disgusting. The holocaust is another. The Backstreet Boys reuniting is right up there, too.

But apparently Oil for Food is the most disgusting thing in human history to the right. Go figure.

Oh, and there's this:
...the French, Russian and German governments also appear to have been hip-deep in it. Personally, if I were President of the United States I would have withdrawn from the UN over the issue - it is a taint upon American honor to be associated with the UN.

A taint upon American honor, huh?
Documents obtained by CNN reveal the United States knew about, and even condoned, embargo-breaking oil sales by Saddam Hussein's regime, and did so to shore up alliances with Iraq's neighbors.

The oil trade with countries such as Turkey and Jordan appears to have been an open secret inside the U.S. government and the United Nations for years.

And:
CIA analyst Charles A. Duelfer's report on Iraq's weapons programs included lists of governments, political parties, companies and individuals from at least 44 nations who received vouchers to buy oil -- both legally and otherwise -- from the Iraqi government during Saddam Hussein's reign.

The names on the politically explosive list are French, Russian, Chinese, Canadian and Japanese; if Duelfer had had his way, U.S. companies and individuals would have been included, too.

But he was overruled by CIA lawyers. The report instead lists some voucher recipients only as "U.S. person" and "U.S. company," explaining in a footnote that disclosure was barred by the 1974 Privacy Act and "other applicable law."

Seems the U.S. had waded pretty far in as well. Of course, that's unimportant to the right, who simply want to vilify the U.N. and others who stood up against Bush and his invasion of Iraq by claiming it's worse than the holocaust.

Let me state, for the record, that I don't support the actions that occurred during the Oil for Food mess. But I also don't support blaming others for a mess that we are partly responsible for making, and using that a call to demonize the U.N. and countries that disagreed with the President on whether to invade Iraq.