An amusing little contretemps

Here’s an amusing story from the New York Times, today, May 5, 2005, p.A11:

“American officials rushing to start small building projects in a large swath of Iraq in 2003 and 2004 did not keep required records on the spending of some $89.3 million in cash and cannot account at all for another $7.2 million, a federal watchdog reported yesterday.”

Well.

You might think that I, liberal as I am, might choose to rant and rave about this. After all, can you imagine the wingnut echo chamber’s rant if Head Start couldn’t account for $96.6 million? What would Rush and Sean and Anne say? I think we can agree that they’d be apoplectic.

But I’m not.

It’s not that much money, is it?

See, here’s a $100 million. (I’m going to round up for tidiness’ sake.)

It takes ten of those to make a billion dollars.

And what has Iraq cost us so far? Can we be charitable and agree on about $190 billion? I mean, that’s not even $200 billion. Then we’d be talking real money.

So here’s that amount. See if you can find our $96.6 million.

See, $96.6 million is just not that much to get excited about, is it?

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