Thanks for Nothing

A Government Accounting Office estimate that $1-billion in improper FEMA payments were made in the aftermath of last summer’s storms may be understated…and most of the money is unrecoverable.

Examples of the abuse/obliviousity include the loss of 42 out of 145 laptops bought to help with FEMA operations during the hurricanes. These are now presumed lost or stolen. Many Global Positioning System tracking devices were also lost or stolen.

FEMA gave $17 million in housing assistance to people who had already obtained free trailers or apartments, and $20 million that went to those who improperly claimed for help for both storms. Perhaps Congress, always in the mood to tax someone else's windfall profits, could tap double-dippers from Texas to Florida for their ill-gotten largesse at taxpayer expense.

Speaking of parasites …guess where the latest crop of entitlement spongers has been incubating: Iraq.

When the Iran Study Group released its report this week urging US combat troop withdrawals by 2008, you’d have thought someone was trying to steal Al Sharpton’s food stamp allotment.
Iraqi parliamentarians are crying foul, saying the US as an occupying force is responsible for their country’s well-being…

The issues in Iraq are dire enough without home-boy politicians in that country criticizing our behavior, while failing to curb the enthusiasm of Sunni and Shi’ite death squads.
There is a corollary to the give a fish/teach to fish parable: give an Iraqi a US soldier, and you protect him for a day; teach the Iraqi how to fight like a US soldier, and he can protect himself for life.

There are few things more reprehensible than ingratitude, especially when the good that has been done was paid for with the blood of men and women patriots in American uniforms.