More missing cash reported by the Pentagon

A Friday afternoon right before a big holiday weekend is a great time to give the public bad news. People are more worried about how to get their boss to let them off early than paying attention to what’s going on in the world at large.

Not only did John McCain release his health records for a brief period (what a joke), but more importantly the Pentagon reported that they can’t account for 15 billion dollars worth of goods and services purchased from contractors involved in the Iraq occupation.

Many of us have heard stories of trucks driving around Iraq with pallets of cash in them, but I don’t know if anyone realized that it was this bad. Just to put it in perspective, California’s budget deficit this year is somewhere around that amount. So as Schwarzenegger is scrambling to cut the a deficit, the Pentagon is basically pissing away money.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but our government is terrible at keeping track of its money. Not that anyone remembers, but just prior to 9/11/2001, Dick Cheney reported that the Pentagon could not account for somewhere between two and three trillion dollars. I might also add that that news was also revealed on a Friday prior to a holiday weekend.