Go take a look at Weez’s suggested election poster for the Libs. (To minimise confusion for my American visitors, understand that the Liberal Party in Australia are actually conservatives, Tories to the core.)

Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, summarising part of his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, argues that one large contributor to the current distrust and militancy amongst Iraqis is the way that the Bush Administration chose people to oversee the transition from dictatorship to democracy under the aegis of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Jim O’Beirne of the Pentagon vetted who went, and the people he passed as suitable were mostly not qualified experts in the Middle-East or post-conflict reconstruction, but they were known Bush loyalists:

A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest