It's crap like this that Americans are tired of, and has such a distinctly partisan stench attached to it. More and more Americans are sick of the rubber-stamp congressional republicans...and with any luck at all, they'll be unemployed soon (or at least a goodly number of them will be).

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

Why is anyone surprised that CheneyBurton will operate with no oversight now? Why is anyone even in the least surprised that the republicans killed this on a party-line vote in secret? It's what they do, it's who they are and it's hopefully finally going to cost them the only things they understand, their power and perks.