The nervous nellies in Congress just don’t get it. As soon as they see the price tag they start whining about “fiscal irresponsibility” this and “shoddy planning” that. Deficit, debt, uncertain future, blah blah blah.

But we the people know better. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this is a great day for rocket scientists. When you make the connection between the 87 billion dollars and the U.S.’s insistence that we lead the Iraqi rebuilding effort, it all becomes clear. That’s 87 billion dollars of taxpayer money that we’ll be paying mostly to ourselves. Or, rather, those of “ourselves” who happen to find themselves working in the military or its attendant industries. And, oh yeah, the oil industry - it turns out that the biggest industry in Iraq, the one that needs rebuilding, is oil. Weird, huh? We just so happen to have an oil industry that can help out!

The rebuilders and protectors of Iraq need to be paid. [You don’t expect Halliburton to fix up Iraq out of the kindness of their hearts, do you? Even if they stand to reap additional billions somewhere down the road…] And as long as we make sure that the other nations of the world have absolutely no substantive input in the decision-making process, we’re virtually guaranteed that nearly every penny we spend is a penny spent on Americans. So even as the deficit metastasizes, the stock market can rise on the strength of American companies who are earning, spending, and hiring!

What’s the catch? There is no catch! Well, eventually a Democrat or a fiscally responsible Republican will have to take office and fix the red ink thing. But for now, those tax dollars can be paid out to the war effort as fast as they come in. Faster, actually. Much, much faster.

The weak sisters of the opposition wanted the US to go into Iraq with a broad international coalition. If we’d done that, they say, there’d have been fewer American casualties and Arab anger would have been less intense and more evenly distributed over the international community. Sure, whatever. But now we’d be paying out our rebuilding dollars to companies from other countries! Many of which aren’t even allowed to contribute to an American political campaign. And what’s the point of that?

In hindsight, it’s a blessing that we went to war making unprovable, misleading, and demonstrably false claims about weapons of mass destruction. Why, if we hadn’t, some of those other nations might have joined us! And now their military industrial complexes would be reaping the benefits. That whole obvious-nonexistence-of-WMD’s thing turned out to be a real stroke of luck.

Construction, energy, financing…. those were the industries with the real vision and courage back during the 2000 election cycle, and it’s only right that they should profit from it. So as you send your health insurance-less child off to an inferior public school through the polluted morning air, don’t pity her. If she’d wanted a better life, well, she should’ve thought of that back when George W. Bush was taking campaign donations.