Save Wolfie!? Oh pleeaze! Because the WSJ says it's a railroad job!? Yeah, right, they thought Michael Milken was being railroaded too.

Sorry Karol, but you're totally off on this one.

Favorite of conservatives ? Sure if you like Chalabi, Straus, Trotsky, big government, the Knicks and Beltway Traffic. Save Wolfie ? He was pulling strings to help his girlfriend get more dinero. If it was Clinton, conservatives would be on the warpath. It's a pretty simple decision here folks. Why, I'd even call it a cakewalk.

A culture of corruption dominates the World Bank and the UN. Bush sent in Wolfowitz and Bolton to try to stop the looting.

The looters are attacking Wolfowitz as he is trying to cut off the source of their wealth. The US should stand up to Soros and his henchmen and insure that reform efforts go forward.

If Wolfowitz goes, our funding should go.

Redhand,

Maybe if you took some time to get acquainted with the case you'd see this is all just a media hit job. The WSJ isn't the first organization to point it out, either.

Redhand,

I admit I haven't been following this particular story, therefore, can you kindly educate me about how the case against Wolfowitz is fair and just ?

Thank you.

Hear hear!

I started out thinking Gonzales should stay and Wolf should go. After reading more about the facts of each case I changed my mind.

Oh Jeeze, not the "media hit job" meme again.

Wolfie's judgment in this matter was about as good as his assessment of the number of troops it would take to pacify Iraq. I'm sorry, but anybody with an ounce of ethical instinct should know that it's ill-advised to have any role in giving your girlfriend a mega raise, regardless of circumstances. Ever hear of the phrase "sweetheart deal?"

I don't pretend to be privy to all the facts, but I do note this:WASHINGTON, May 7 — A committee of World Bank directors has formally notified Paul D. Wolfowitz that they found him to be guilty of a conflict of interest in arranging for a pay raise and promotion for Shaha Ali Riza, his companion, in 2005. The findings stepped up the pressure on Mr. Wolfowitz to resign. The contents of the panel’s findings were not made public. People who are familiar with the panel’s report said that it reviewed extensive documents and testimony before concluding that Mr. Wolfowitz breached his obligations in arranging for Ms. Riza’s reassignment from the bank to the State Department.I have zero sympathy for this schmu*k. He in indelibly stained with the blood of thousands of dead and maimed Americans for his for role in getting us quagmired in Iraq. I thought his appointment to the World Bank after that was a grotesque parody of McNamara's arc following Vietnam. As far as I'm concerned, Wolfie can't be ejected from any role in public life fast enough. And I don't care if it's like getting Al Capone for tax evasion rather than murder. The guy deserves all the obloquy he's currently suffering, and then some.

Redhand,

Thanks for the summary.
I was particularly impressed by your honest admission when you wrote,

"I don't pretend to be privy to all the facts,..."

as well as when you admit you're judging the World Bank situation by how you feel about the Iraq war when you wrote,

"I have zero sympathy for this schmu*k. He is indelibly stained with the blood of thousands of dead and maimed Americans for his for role in getting us quagmired in Iraq.....As far as I'm concerned, Wolfie can't be ejected from any role in public life fast enough."

Karol, see also Melanie Phillips' latest excellent post on the subject.

Redhand,

That's all you got? A committee of UN bureaucrats has made an accusation, so it must be true? Boy, you musta split a neuron with that kind of mental heavy lifting!

Like I said, read up on the case. Then, assuming you haven't changed your mind, come back and we can discuss it.

Eric, kindly note the sentence in the article: "The contents of the panel’s findings were not made public." I'm not an investigative reporter, and as BadBoyInASuit noted, don't really care what the particular facts are. I'm a radicalized conservative-- Balloon Juice is too hot for me, politburo diktat 2.0 is “just right”-- who is unashamedly enjoying the mugging and "murder" of someone I deeply despise.

If you listened to NPR this evening you would have heard a conservative think tank colleague of Wolfie's of some 30 years express amazement that Wolfowitz could have been so stupid as to think that he could get away with having any role in the GF's raise, given his conservative pedigree and the liberal WB environment into which he golden-parachuted. The commentator thought the only explanation was Wolfie's inability to believe that others would not hold him in as high esteem as he did himself.

The commentator also drew the Caesar's wife analogy, and mentioned flashing assassin's knives. Quite apt, I thought. I especially liked the commentator's close: "Wolfowitz is probably not getting what he deserves, but is definitely getting what is coming to him."

So this may well be a public assassination on a Caesarian scale, latter day Roman street justice for a "senator" who couldn't imaging anyone really coming after him, what with all his years of distinguished public service to the Republic, blah, blah, blah.

There are times when a man's fate is sealed by a single public statement that does incalculable harm to others, and which tips the scales against him despite all the other "good things" he has done. Wolfie faced such a moment when:During Wolfowitz's pre-war testimony before Congress, he dismissed General Eric K. Shinseki's estimates of the size of the post war occupation force as incorrect and estimated that fewer than 100,000 troops would be necessary in the war. Two days after Shinseki testified, Wolfowitz said to the House Budget Committee on February 27, 2003:

"There has been a good deal of comment - some of it quite outlandish - about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army - hard to imagine."At the time Wolfowitz said this I thought his public trashing of a solid military professional's judgment was outrageous and dangerous. We now know, through thousands of war deaths and wounds, just how wrong Wolfie's rosy prediction was.

To those who cry "foul" because of Wolfie's thousand cuts at the hands of a howling liberal mob, I say, with apologies to George W. Bush, "Bring 'em on!"

Redhand, I wrote "Make no mistake about it, Wolfie is being forced out because of what he believes, not what he has done." Your comments just prove my point. You hate Wolfowitz for reasons outside his performance at the World Bank. If only his other detractors would just admit to the same.

Redhand,

It turns out Wolfowitz was very upfront about his relationship to his girlfriend. He told the board he had a conflict of interest and asked that someone else be appointed to do her evaluation.

They told him no, that was his job, and he would be expected to do it. So he did.

The real problem here is lots of bureaucrats don't like the fact he's actually starting to look at what they've been doing. Like every other facet of the United Nations, the World Bank is shot through with corrupt rent-seekers.

I understand you don't like him. But it's not a "meme" to say it's a media hit job. The media knows the whole story, but they're not reporting it.

Look folks, thanks for giving me props about being up front re le Scandal Wolfie. As you might have inferred, I was equally unhappy about the humanitarian career McNamara tried to make for himself at the WB after Vietnam.

My own political pedigree has been solidly conservative until Bush 43. I even felt that it was Gore who was trying to rip off the 2000 election through manipulative, selective county recounts in Florida, and that the the S. Ct. did the right thing in stopping the vote litigation nonsense after that by confirming Bush's win.

The Iraq war is what infected me with BDS. Being old enough to remember how LBJ lied us into Vietnam with the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident," I was deeply suspicious of the rhetorical run-up from the Bush Administration going into Iraq. I was equally appalled by the civilians overriding the military's judgments about what was necessary, having believed we learned the "overwhelming force only" lesson from the 91 Gulf War. Sadly, no.

What sparked my rage in this thread was the notion that we should feel sympathy for Wolfowitz, i.e. "Save Wolfie." Karol, I probably wouldn't have gone off the rails but for the title of your post, since I don't think he deserves being saved.

To me, the larger, more important questions of the day are: (1) how do we extricate ourselves from Iraq while salvaging some of our geopolitical influence in the region; and (2) is the damage to the conservative movement wrought by the Bush Administration irreparable for the next generation or so?

I fear Iraq is going to end very badly for us, and that the lasting achievement of the Bush presidency will be a return of Democratic federal government control for a long, long time.

Except this doesn't have anything to do with Iraq. It has to do with Wolfowitz's actions at the World Bank.

Personally I feel he should be fired. He should of used is own judgement in deciding if it was ethical to get his GF a job and not have asked the ethics board. Because who was on the ethics board and personanlly approved the action? Ad Melkert a dutch social democrat politian that lost the election against Pim Fortuyn big time. After the election failure he was given a cushy job at the World Bank and left holland in shame. Anyone who listens to that guy for ethics advise (or advice on anything for that matter) should be fired.

More facts are coming out about this in a WAPO article titled Bank Rebukes Wolfowitz On Ethics. It would appear Wolfie's GF was really pis*ed about having her career derailed by his presidency, so much so that, according to him: the chairman of the ethics panel thought that "due to my personal relationship with Ms. Riza, I was in the best position to persuade her to take out-placement and thereby achieve the 'pragmatic solution' the committee desired." So he just had to give her that mega raise, without consulting the WB's general counsel, due to her "intractable position."

Pardon me while I vomit. The man was an idiot for falling into this situation. It's doubly hysterical (is this really the right word here, maybe "ludicrous" would be better?) that his justification for excluding the general counsel is that it would have placed the general counsel himself in "a conflict." D'oh, anyone ever hear of appointing special outside counsel in a situation like this? I'm sure there are plenty of Manhattan mega firms that would have been all too happy to help. (Joke).

As I said before, "anybody with an ounce of ethical instinct should know that it's ill-advised to have any role in giving your girlfriend a mega raise, regardless of circumstances."

Time for this clown to go. He clearly doesn't have the judgment, or the backbone, to run a major institution like the WB, much less spearhead a major anti-corruption initiative. This was a Business Ethics 101 issue, and he blew it. That it's happening to Wolfie with his Iraq war baggage is icing on the cake.

Of course the Bush Administration stands by Wolfie. Any President who thinks that "I can't remember" Gonzo is doing a great job as AG won't be troubled in the slightest by this ethical mess at the WB.