Why should Bush be the only one to manipulate the events in Iraq for political gain?

California Rep. Darrell Issa, whose sixth-top contributor is Qualcomm, is lobbying Congress to build a new cellular network -- from scrach -- using the U.S. standard CMDA (popularized by Qualcomm) rather than the existing GSM standard (popular in Europe).

His reasoning? That way people using their cell phones (or should I call them freedom phones?) while rebuilding Iraq will be helping funnel money to Americans "If European GSM technology is deployed in Iraq, much of the equipment used to build the cell phone system would be manufactured in France, Germany, and elsewhere in western and northern Europe." For shame!

While we're at it, why don't we bomb all the buildings so that American contractors can make money rebuilding them? Oh, wait.

At least Issa's not ashamed of this blatant pandering to a campaign contributor: He said, "It happens that the A-prime beneficiary would be Qualcomm." (Just in case the company missed the significance of this move.)

I wonder how many of the 5 million residents of Baghdad have CMDA-equipped phones.