It seems that we have all pretty well staked out our political beliefs (except for Jaireaux, who still seems pretty undecided on that Bush fellow). So this seemed like a good time to posit a big religious question that has been bothering me.
As many of you know, an unspoken but very real part of the Catechism is that people are just too stupid to interpret the Bible. Or, as the Church puts it, “The task of interpreting the Word of God authentically has been entrusted solely to the Magisterium of the Church, that is, to the Pope and to the bishops in communion with him.”
Read more!
Today’s reason: increased private sector without increased oversight.
The U.S.‘s offenses in Iraqi prisons are an easy target for the left, but thanks to the media spotlight and international uproar it appears that the President is doing the right thing and the new commander of prisons, Major General Geoffrey Miller, is cleaning things up and opening the doors for international review. (However, a preemptive action — or even a publicized reaction before the media explosion — on our part would have gone a lot further to combat the current comparisons to Saddam Hussein’s prison antics.) One of the issues arising from this mess is the adminstration’s love of hiring private sector companies to (mis)manage projects without enhancing the processes of oversight and accountability.
… J. P. London, chief executive of CACI, one of the companies involved, said in an interview on Monday [ 5/3/2004 ] that “we have not received any information or direction from the client regarding our work in country — no charges, no communications, no citations, no calls to appear at the Pentagon.”
This is another recurring theme with this administration. A close Republican friend of mine expressed the opinion that he felt no remorse driving his Ford Valdez because he was confident that any damage done to the environment would be fixed by the government eventually. It doesn’t matter if someone does something wrong, as long as we eventually do something about it — after the public knows we screwed up. Paired with the trouble of punishing an outsourcer versus the discipline that can be handed out “in-house” through military regluations, the setup for a company escaping the consequences of their actions is clear. Not to mention that the restricted legal actions the Republicans are always pushing for reduce how these companies can be penalized.
There’s been a lot of venom thrown about how the Administration is shielding themselves from the human costs of action in Afghanistan and Iraq by bringing coffins and wounded servicemembers home in the middle of the night. (My feelings in comments here )
One of the things that’s whispered at is that GWB spends a fair amount of time walking the halls up at Walter Reed Army Hospital outside of DC actually meeting the folks who have worked for us. Snopes has more here. IMO, private, personal acknowledgement to the soldiers, airmen, marines, and sailors is admirable, more so than if he’d had a photo-op saluting coffins being offloaded.
Encouraged by my friend Christian’s reciept of a beta G-Mail account through Blogger, and in an effort to carry through on my resolutions I started a running blog, much in the spirit of the Smi-Collum’s summer blog.
Just wanted y’all to know I was two-timing.
The guy’s apparently a professor at Howard U, and is a non-shrill voice from the left. His bit on nonviolence as reality has an interesting tidbit: Instead of constantly screaming and raging, I think that after the collapse of the WTC towers the country should have calmly bound up its wounds and waited while the President sent envoys to Kandahar and called the Taliban’s bluff by presenting the evidence of the guilt of Bin Laden and his associates. I think the results would have been surprising. There’s at least a 50 percent chance that it would have worked, especially if this could have been done within the Pashtun codes.
Cyn, we even?