Maybe the next presidential candidate to emphasize "competence" won't be laughed at

I wouldn't hold my breath, though. Still, considering that when George W. Bush took office, the prevailing wisdom ran the gamut of "Thank God the grownups are now in charge" and "Don't worry, his father will be running everything anyway", all that insistence on suits and ties and sexual restraint looks like just so much window-dressing now:

A pair of new reports have delivered sharply critical judgments about the State Department’s performance in overseeing work done by the private companies that the government relies on increasingly in Iraq and Afghanistan to carry out delicate security work and other missions.

A State Department review of its own security practices in Iraq assails the department for poor coordination, communication, oversight and accountability involving armed security companies like Blackwater USA, according to people who have been briefed on the report. In addition to Blackwater, the State Department’s two other security contractors in Iraq are DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

At the same time, a government audit expected to be released Tuesday says that records documenting the work of DynCorp, the State Department’s largest contractor, are in such disarray that the department cannot say “specifically what it received” for most of the $1.2 billion it has paid the company since 2004 to train the police officers in Iraq.

It amazes me that while wingnuts are calling talk radio shows demanding audits of the Frost family finances so they can determine whether Graeme and Gemma Frost "deserve" to be in the SCHIP program, they don't care one bit about the $9 billion that went missing in Iraq or the $1.2 billion that DynCorp was paid to train police officers -- an expenditure that has yielded no results and isn't even documented for accountability.