Stupid is

Saw this at Americablog;

A hotel owner in Sugar Land, Tex., has been charged with submitting $232,000 in bills for phantom victims. And roughly 1,100 prison inmates across the Gulf Coast apparently collected more than $10 million in rental and disaster-relief assistance.

There are the bureaucrats who ordered nearly half a billion dollars worth of mobile homes that are still empty, and renovations for a shelter at a former Alabama Army base that cost about $416,000 per evacuee.

And there is the Illinois woman who tried to collect federal benefits by claiming she watched her two daughters drown in the rising New Orleans waters. In fact, prosecutors say, the children did not exist.

The tally of ignoble acts linked to Hurricane Katrina, pulled together by The New York Times from government audits, criminal prosecutions and Congressional investigations, could rise because the inquiries are under way. Even in Washington, a city accustomed to government bloat, the numbers are generating amazement.

John at Americablog spins this as more Bush Co. incompetence, but it really goes beyond that. We know this Republican administration is inept, but this is simply the human condition. Shear stupidity caused this. Stupidity caused the problems with the levees. Stupidity caused people to misallocate funds. Greed caused others to bilk the system.

Who is the guy that ordered a half a billion dollars worth of useless mobile homes? I'd wager he's really fucking stupid.

The moral of this story is that it's kind of difficult for me to get worked up by this sort of thing, because I've come to accept that it's simply part of the human condition. When mother nature collides with greed and rampant stupidity, you get a colossal waste of money.

The amusing part is, the fed is going to try and get some of their money back and prosecute people, which - you guessed it - costs money, and will no doubt be highly affected by the stupid factor, which means it's going to cost a lot of money.

I guess part of my narcissism stems from having moved to a southern "bible belt" state. Simply by definition, there are far more morons here then you'd find living in a coastal or Northern area.. which interestingly also tracks by political party affiliation.