It begins

There's no need to wait until January to start exercising some adult oversight over the republicans in Congress. The New York Times notes the newest brilliant idea of the people who brought you Iraq in the first place; now, they're trying to kill the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

The reason for that is not that the work of that office is done, but that it has consistently embarrassed the junta by finding fraud, waste, abuse and bribery in some very inconvenient places. To quote:

Investigations by the Iraq oversight agency, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., have already led to convictions of American occupation officials on bribery charges and uncovered many instances of substandard construction.

Mr. Bowen’s investigations of Halliburton have uncovered tens of millions of dollars of charges for work that achieved little in the way of results, but apparently met the letter of the company’s contract with the United States to repair oil facilities. Mr. Bowen has also found that Halliburton has been using federal loopholes to impede investigations of its work by declaring nearly all information about company activities in Iraq to be proprietary, or sensitive because it could aid the company’s competitors.

So it came as a surprise to many that Mr. Bowen’s office was directed to go out of business on Oct. 1, 2007, by an obscure provision in an authorization bill that [chimperor] Bush signed last month. The termination language was quietly inserted into the bill by staff members working for Representative Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who now leads the House Armed Services Committee.

So yeah, that's over. And if republicans shut it down, because they like wasting tax dollars so much, come January, we'll re-open the office - and dare the chimp to veto that. Or the legislation that bars Halliburton from Federal contracts until it's disgorged every last god-damn penny of taxpayer money it got dishonestly.