Scandals large and small have dogged the Republicans, and two more - one quite local, and the other national - have broken over the last week, showing that political markets, like economic ones, often correct all at once. One is about pink elephants, the other is about flying pork.

The Union Leader puts the hard rock in rock ribbed conservative. Which is why their challenge to Republican powerhouse Burton is such a shock:

And of course, there is the issue everyone wants to keep in the closet: Burton's sex offender problem. Ray Burton knowingly hid convicted sex offender Mark Seidensticker on his staff for years.

The Republican Party is shocked to find out that some of the 'phants pulling the train are pink. What matters to the voters, is that there is now a pervasive pattern of Republicans covering up for criminal activity - both personal and public - using the powers of the office to hide from the consequences.

In these waning days it is clear that New Hampshire's GOP is showing cracks of the kind that brought down the old man of the mountain - the iconic granite face that is still on the state's quarter. underfunded Carol Shea-Porter has ridden a wave of popular support and desire for change to within striking distance of taking New Hampshire's First District, even as Paul Hodes is now considered likely to win NH-02. It would be an astonishing political transformation.

Not that New Hampshire is "liberal" in the big city Democratic sense, but it is "liberal" in the old agrarian sense of the kind that brought many heartland New Dealers to Washington. New Hampshire's south is tied to the Boston Metro economy, and more broadly to the high tech economy - Nashua New Hampshire stands at the northern tip of one of the most tech rich job areas in the country. New Hampshire's Republican Party has also behave more like New Hampshire's Monarchist Party - supporting political dynasties, personal favors, and a malignent neglect of the engines of growth. New Hampshire may like its taxes low, but it doesn't like its job growth low.

The personal scandal surrounding Burton is one of a string of revelations - even as the Republican front runner goes back on his supposedly "notoriously pro-gay" libertarian stance to stump for closed marriage laws - that shows that sexual orientation and political orientation aren't particularly correlated. But then, history has shown that who you are in bed with politically is different from who are are in bed with eroticly.

But endorsements don't win elections, and New Hampshire's residents now have to turn out and decide for themselves whether or not to turn Bass and Bradley - two reliable Republican Rubberstampers - out. Out being, at this point, a very operative word in New Hampshire Poltics.

In addition to local scandals, the phants are now afraid that the last image people have going into the voting booth involves corruption and potentially catastrophic blunders in the way Iraq has been handled.

Key Democratic Senators called for an investigation into the conduct of the war in Iraq, and Byron Dorgan has followed it up with a list of the top 20 outrages his committee has uncovered. He has said he is prepared to move forward with legislation that would require contractors to provide data in their native electronic format (NEF), and with other actions as appropriate. He points out that all of what his committee has done has been without sub peona power - this is all, in otherwords, low hanging fruit.

This morning the scope of the incompetence and partisanization of government at the hands of the Repbulicans in the White House and Congress received two more bullet points: The New York Times reports that government web archive lets nuclear secrets out of the bag. On top of this the Republican Congress closing down the auditors office in Iraq, which has revealed criminal waste and abuse in the occupation.

Government is, by definition, political. A party that runs the govenment apparatus well, is reëlected, and that makes government departments, in a sense, partisan organs. However, there is a large difference between running government well, and reaping the rewards at the ballot box, and using government as a political arm, to promote a particular point of view. The web archive - put out to create a huge resevoir of disinformatzia, is only one of a string of abuses.

The closing of the auditor's office is almost an action item for the next Democratic Congress to reverse: the action is the culmination of a three year long struggle to prevent oversight - in July of 2003 Helen Dewar of the Post reported how Senate Republicans shut down oversight into Iraq in the early days of the occupation.

The web archive shows how closely tied the current Repbulican regime is to the noise machine. The archive's release publicly served no legitimate purpose, except to create a vast drudge pool of innuendo and talking points. In doing so, however, real information about pre-1991 activities was released, and this information provides a valuable outline for any group with the resources and the dedication to build an atomic device. Sadly know called it in the air months ago.

Dorgan's drilling into outrages and abuses is no election year conversion he has been having whistleblowers step forward and getting results for some time now, and is hamstrung by the unwillingness of the Republicans in the Senate to investigate their own.

One of the telling examples of how corruption and failed conception go hand in hand is the item on trucks being left by the roadside because the broke down, and "cost-plus" assured their replacement. The failure of the occupation to secure roads in Iraq has led to large numbers of fatalities to IEDs, and a growing reliance on air transport. It is also leading to the gradually cutting off of Baghdad from the rest of Iraq. This failure - the failure to protect the logistical supply line which is the life blood of an army, means that equipment is being left for the enemy, because of lack of preparation and exposure. It also shows why military transport needs to remain in the hands of uniformed militar personnel - we must be able to protect what we move.

It isn't just in the US where there has been a failure to investigate Iraq because of partisan considerations. However, as the nation which is 90% of the mission, and which has taken the bulk of non-Iraqi fatalities and casualties - an investigation here is essential. It is clear even from the few examples that have, almost literally, fallen from the tree, that talking about "What is going right." is to be a cheerleader for failure.

The broader picture is that corruption and waste are not streamers cast by the wayside on a victory parade, a regretable side effect of a big push to accomplish some great social end, but, instead the result of a failed conception of a war which was a bad idea in the first place.

It is also clear that "cost-plus", which has been pointed to as a cause of military overspending for more than 20 years now, needs to be dramatically restricted as a means of military contracting, and reserved only for those cases where a situation is so urgent that "money is no object". However, even, or perhaps especially, in nation building operations, there are many fewer such cases than government contractors might want.

For an administration that has said that we can't wait to find out whether the "smoking gun" is a "mushroom cloud" this is a particularly egregious bungle. In fact, under the "1% doctrine" the web site should have been bombed into the ground, because it certainly presents more than a 1% chance of creating nuclear terrorism.

[Updated: The White House now blames the New York Times, lying about how the secrets were removed promptly, when, in fact, they only were removed after the New York Times story was in the pipeline.]