Former BushCorp™ official Wolfowitz gives girlfriend enormous raise

You can take the boy out of BushCorp™, but you can't take BushCorp™ out of the boy.

World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz apologized today for his role in granting raises to a bank staffer with whom he was romantically involved, saying he should have stayed out of the matter.

Wolfowitz did not specify exactly what role he played. But his statement came on the same day the Web site of the Financial Times newspaper reported the existence of a memorandum that Wolfowitz wrote spelling out how the bank should handle the career of his romantic partner, Shaha Riza.

[snip]

Wolfowitz has been assailed in recent days by a barrage of questions about two large salary increases that were given to his girlfriend and colleague, Riza. Visibly agitated during a news conference today, he tacitly acknowledged playing a role in those increases.

Wolfowitz, President Bush's choice to head the World Bank, took over in 2005. Riza was transferred to the State Department shortly afterward, in accordance with conflict-of-interest rules. She is still paid by the bank and she has received raises that increased her pay to $193,590 from $132,660, according to the bank's employee association, which has said the raises violated bank rules that limit the size of pay increases.

Wolfowitz, former deputy to disgraced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, is best remembered for his role in "planning" the US' brilliant Iraq strategy, as well the spectacular lack of imagination which seems to characterize the admin's Iraq warhawks:

It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army - hard to imagine.

Hard to imagine indeed.

Anyway.

As is apparent from today's news, Wolfowitz also demonstrates, in light of the emerging US Attorney scandal one of the other defining characteristics of BushCorp™, the use of bureaucratic power to reward one's friends, however inappropriately.

All of which provides more evidence for this exceedingly obvious observation about Bushies: If you believe government is the problem (except when it wages war) then why bother to even try for good government practices?

Bushies certainly don't.