“We’ve got to solve problems. We’re problem-solvers.”–President George W. Bush, from a recording made in the president’s colon.

Do not let it be said that our president cannot act decisively when he gets around to it. Now he has boldly called forth the Big Dick himself to go to New Orleans.

In today’s Boston Globe, Derrick Jackson explains that you know Bush is serious when he whips out the Dick:

For five years now, you could measure how seriously Bush took issues of great magnitude by how deeply Cheney was involved. It was Cheney who ran Bush’s super-secretive energy task force. When Bush wanted a drummer to pound the false connection between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11 into the heads of middle America, Cheney responded on the speech circuit and Sunday talk shows, as he himself likes to say, ‘’big time.”

Dick the Dick has been charged with the job of assessing the government’s role in Katrina rescue and recovery operations and remove “any bureaucratic obstacles that may be preventing us from achieving our goals.”

In today’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd speculates about what those goals might be.

Maybe Mr. Cheney is going down to New Orleans to hunt looters. Or to make sure that Halliburton’s lucrative contract to rebuild the city is watertight. Or maybe, since former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana described the shattered parish as “Baghdad under water,” the vice president plans to take his pal Ahmad Chalabi along for a consultation on destroying minority rights.

Or, maybe he’ll be helping former Bushie FEMA head Joe Allbaugh get his influence-peddling racket off the ground. Josh tells us,

This article from the September 1st edition of the Post noted that Allbaugh was already in Louisiana “helping coordinate the private-sector response to the storm.” …

… I’d been so focused on Allbaugh’s Iraq operation, that I had lost track of what he was up to on the domestic rain-making activities.

First, there’s Blackwell Fairbanks, the outfit he set up with Andrew Lundquist, the guy who ran Vice President Cheney’s energy policy task force. And then of course there’s Allbaugh’s main shop, The Allbaugh Company, the one Haley Barbour[*] helped him set up along with New Bridge Strategies, the Iraq venture.

I figure he’s in Louisiana wearing the Allbaugh Company hat, seeing as how a few months back he signed on as a lobbyist for Halliburton subsidiary KBR to “educate the congressional and executive branch on defense, disaster relief and homeland security issues.”

[*]You’ll remember that Haley Barbour is the governor of Mississippi at the moment.

Regarding Halliburton, which just got a $500 million U.S. Navy contract for emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and marine facilities, the company reported being paid $10.7 billion for Iraq-related contracts in 2003 and 2004. Pentagon auditors have questioned tens of millions of dollars of Halliburton charges, however.

From the Illinois Journal Standard:

Consider the plight of Bunnatine Greenhouse, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lead official for government contracts, whose demotion last week to a position with no influence was obscured by news of Hurricane Katrina. What did the otherwise highly respected civil servant do to earn such harsh discipline from the government she, by all accounts, served admirably throughout her career?

She issued pointed criticism about the awarding of $20 billion in no-bid contracts to Halliburton, the Texas-based oil services company headed by Vice President Dick Cheney prior to his being named to the Bush ticket. Cheney, according to some reports, may still own more than 400,000 shares of Halliburton stock.

And Halliburton and its subsidiaries now own more than half of Iraq reconstruction projects.

Meanwhile, the probe into how billions of Iraq contract money disappeared under Halliburton’s watch seems to have stalled.

Mo Dowd reports that in the days just following Hurricane Katrina, Dick the Dick had been shopping “for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St. Michael’s, a retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy has a weekend home.” But now he’s got a shot at owning a big chunk of the oil-rich Gulf Coast, and at bargain-basement prices!

Cross-posted to The Mahablog. Adventures in Problem Solving Part III, which repeats much of eRobin’s excellent post, below, is posted here.