dawkins writes:

Not much to say about this one. The New York Times does an excellent job of laying it right out:

Executives, employees and political action committees of the 70 companies that received government contracts for work in either Iraq or Afghanistan contributed slightly more than $500,000 to President Bush's 2000 election campaign, according to a comprehensive study of the contracts released on Tuesday.

The overwhelming majority of government contracts for billions of dollars of reconstruction work in Iraq and Afghanistan went to companies run by executives who were heavy political contributors to both political parties.

Though the employees contributed to both parties, their giving favored Republicans by a two-to-one margin. And they gave more money to Mr. Bush than any other politician in the last 12 years.

On a related note, I’m beginning to enjoy the Bush administration’s growing love affair with the “career” employees at various government agencies.

Recall that it was just over a year ago that Bush dismissed the report put out by his own EPA explaining that human activities caused global warming. Then, he sneered:

"I read the report put out by the bureaucracy."

Today, it’s career bureaucrats who are both saving his ass and taking the fall for his myriad criminal-esque schemes.

When the Justice Department wants to deflect criticism that there’s a conflict of interest when Ashcroft investigates his ol’ buddy Karl Rove on the Valerie Plame leaks, Justice pleads that it’s the “career” investigators who are doing all the work, not the political appointees.

And it’ll certainly be those hardworking “career” analysts at the CIA who get hung out to dry when the Bushies pin the pre-Iraq war “intelligence” shenanigans on them and their boss George Tenet, rather than on Wolfowitz and Perle and the White House boys who really cooked up the fake WMD “evidence.”

So now, when people start to say the Bushies chose those Iraq contracts based on (gasp!) campaign contributions and cronyism, we’re told again it’s really those “career” folks at the State Department who did it.

The State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, told reporters on Thursday that "the reason that these companies get the contracts has nothing to do with who may have worked there before."

He added: "The decisions are made by career procurement officials. There's a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they're doing the contracts."

Thank goodness for Bush he didn’t act on his instincts and fire every last non-political government employee he could when he had the chance. Where would his sorry hide be now without them?

Blicero adds: speaking of career government employees, we might take a wee peek at Krugman's NY Times column of 11/19/02, "Victors and Spoils":

Rule No. 1: Always have a cover story. The ostensible purpose of the Bush administration's plan to open up 850,000 federal jobs to private competition is to promote efficiency. Competitive vigor, we're told, will end bureaucratic sloth; costs will go down, and everyone — except for a handful of overpaid union members — will be better off.

A few months ago Mr. Rove compared his boss to Andrew Jackson. As some of us noted at the time, one of Jackson's key legacies was the "spoils system," under which federal jobs were reserved for political supporters. The federal civil service, with its careful protection of workers from political pressure, was created specifically to bring the spoils system to an end; but now the administration has found a way around those constraints.

We don't have to speculate about what will follow, because Jeb Bush has already blazed the trail. Florida's governor has been an aggressive privatizer, and as The Miami Herald put it after a careful study of state records, "his bold experiment has been a success — at least for him and the Republican Party, records show. The policy has spawned a network of contractors who have given him, other Republican politicians and the Florida G.O.P. millions of dollars in campaign donations."

What's interesting about this network of contractors isn't just the way that big contributions are linked to big contracts; it's the end of the traditional practice in which businesses hedge their bets by giving to both parties. The big winners in Mr. Bush's Florida are companies that give little or nothing to Democrats. Strange, isn't it? It's as if firms seeking business with the state of Florida are subject to a loyalty test.

So am I saying that we are going back to the days of Boss Tweed and Mark Hanna? Gosh, no — those guys were pikers. One-party control of today's government offers opportunities to reward friends and punish enemies that the old machine politicians never dreamed of.

How far can the new spoils system be pushed? To what extent will it be used to lock in a permanent political advantage for the ruling party? Stay tuned; I'm sure we'll soon find out.