Seriously, I don’t think I could even spend that much in a year. And you should see me in a shoe store. Team BIO reports, and I hope the Democrats in Congress are listening:

As President Bush prepares to ask Congress to throw another $1.2 billion dollars into the gaping maw that is the Iraq Reconstruction Fund, a recent report from the independent Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction shows that at least $3 Billion has been wasted in such efforts since US demolition reconstruction efforts began in 2003.

Highlighted in the report are the following:

There’s the $43.8 million spent on a temporary police training camp that has never even been used.

There’s the $36.4 million for armored vehicles, body armor, and weapons that no one seems able to account for.

There’s the $73 million facility built to train Iraqi security forces that has massive expansion cracks in the walls and trickling sewage from ceilings.

This does not even include all the billions stolen by shady civilian contractors who have been hired to perform certain services for the troops- there’s plenty of billions down the drain there too.

But of course, in the mind of the President, where all is well in Iraq (or at least was until around November 2006) and getting better by the day, what’s a few more billion unaccounted dollars between friends. After all, this Iraq war was all about generating massive corporate profits for the Military Industrial Complex and their derivatives, not about anything so noble as spreading democracy or making the world a safer place.

I honestly believe most Americans “get” this one. That is, as they struggle to find the cash to pay heating bills and health care premiums and fill up the gas tank, they know that all that could be made easier, but for the Wise Old Men of Washington’s inability to spend tax dollars at home. Three billion is a “drop in the bucket,” but as they lotto ad goes, “You got three billion?” I don’t, and neither do you. But it’s your three billion, squeezed out of you every time you pay the federal government a tax, fee, or transfer.

We could do a post a day here on this, and still not cover the extent of the waste. Democrats who aren’t showing spine on ending the war need to be hit with this, hard, over and over again. My 2008 election ad would go something like, “Not only have they wasted or lost billions of your money that could’ve been spent on [insert regional issue here]; they also didn’t make you any safer.” Them’s the plain, hard facts and I know that a clear majority of Americans will reward the party that does something about it.