Dead Presidents

"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?"

That's what Henry Waxman asked L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, former viceroy of the American Empire in our troubled Mesopotamian provinces. No matter how great that question was, Bremer's response was the kicker. Bremer defended this record amount of walking-around money as necessary for something called . . . wait for it . . . Iraqi reconstruction.

"Delay would have been demoralizing and unfair to the citizens of Iraq," Bremer said. "Delay might well have exacerbated the nascent insurgency and thereby increased the danger to Americans on the ground."

Yes, delaying pay to ghost Iraqi employees may have, um, made the situation worse. Worse than it is, like now? When the NIE explains that the term "civil war" does not begin to describe the complexity of the violence in the Iraqi clusterfuck.

But this story is largely being pushed out of the news cycle by the cold weather (because cold weather in February is news?) and . . . attempted murder by a love-crazy astronaut! Murder, jealousy, astronaut! It's like a flame to the moth of our Media Overlords. Or, maybe, like 363 tons of cold, hard cash.