I wonder if the wingnuts have a problem with Paul Wolfowitz dating a Muslim woman and inserting her into the State Department. After all, if Muslims are the modern day communists, then Shaha Riza must be the latter day Alger Hiss. Right? Shouldn’t Dick Cheney team up with Norm Coleman or something and throw a hissy fit about Islamic fellow travelers and Islamic infiltrators in the State Department?
On to the former official: World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, who until 2005 was deputy secretary of defense and a chief architect of the calamitous Iraq war. Not that Wolfowitz had much credibility left, after predicting before the war that Iraqis would greet U.S. troops as “liberators” and that the cost of the war would be mostly defrayed by Iraq’s oil revenue.
Now we learn that when he took over at the World Bank, Wolfowitz personally dictated the terms of an agreement under which his girlfriend — Shaha Riza, a longtime World Bank employee — would be detailed temporarily to the State Department and receive generous pay raises. By the end of Wolfowitz’s five-year term, Riza will be making $244,960 a year. That’s considerably more than the salary of her nominal boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — and Rice has to pay income taxes, whereas Riza and other World Bank employees do not.
Who’s the modern day Whittaker Chambers? Paging Joe Klein. Joe Klein, please report to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
