Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Bowen's supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip, in the form of an obscure provision terminating the federal oversight agency that he heads, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

And Diblert?

A short while back I wrote a piece about how the Dilerbertesque pointy-haired bosses in Team Bush decided to turn a new page in Iraq. Instead of owning up to their own stupidity and coming up with a plan to undo their mistakes, they simply pulled a typical bone-headed management trick of telling the victims that it was time for them to step up to the plate and meet some milestones.

Well, now, this latest story about firing the Inspector General reminds me of my old days in Silicon Valley, the fertile soil of management stupidity from which the Dilbert comic strip was born.

The client, who shall go nameless (at least for now), was having some real software problems. Their upcoming giant upgrade was a mess. The Quality Assurance department had found about 200 serious bugs in the software and was refusing to let the software go out to customers before those bugs were fixed.

Management was furious. They needed that upgrade to ship if they were to make their quarterly numbers.

Did they offer the engineers overtime pay and bonuses to get the software fixed quickly? No.

Did they offer to bring in extra staff? No.

Did they consider dropping some of the features that were the most buggy, and going out with a less feature-rich but at least stable product? No.

What did they do? You guessed it. They fired the QA department - the entire team.

With the stroke of a pen on a bunch of pink slips, they "eliminated" the 200 bugs and shipped the product. Two years later, they were out of business (deservedly).

So - now we have Team Bush, aided by the Republican Congress, "eliminating" the corruption in Iraq by firing the Inspector General who brought so many of the crooks to justice.

There's only ONE way to ensure that the criminals in the White House and their friends get what's really coming to them - and that's by putting the Democrats in charge of one or both houses of Congress. While at best, the Democrats will only have a slim majority and will have to compromise on every piece of legislation they try to pass, the one place they won't have to compromise is on bringing these criminals to justice.

Let the hearings begin. And as I said in my previous Dilbert story - at the end of the day we'll send the bastards to Elbonia!