"Conan,

...what is best in life?"

"To crush your enemies."


"See them driven before you."


"And to hear the lamentation of their women."


An appropriate list, but incomplete.

Add to it cracking the bones of your victims and to get at the sweet marrow.

Add to it rubbing salt into their fresh wounds with a fucking belt sander.

Add to it, this from CNN.com, with the non-paragraph header emphasis added by me...

Firms with White House ties get Katrina contracts

FEMA taps Halliburton subsidiary, Shaw Group, Bechtel for cleanup
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.

One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.

Bechtel National Inc., a unit of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., has also been selected by FEMA to provide short-term housing for people displaced by the hurricane. Bush named Bechtel's CEO to his Export Council and put the former CEO of Bechtel Energy in charge of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
...

Halliburton alone has earned more than $9 billion. Pentagon audits released by Democrats in June showed $1.03 billion in "questioned" costs and $422 million in "unsupported" costs for Halliburton's work in Iraq.

Watchdog groups take notice
...[The} government has got to stop stacking senior positions with people who are repeatedly cashing in on the public trust in order to further private commercial interests," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government
Oversight.

Bush appointees at Halliburton
Allbaugh formally registered as a lobbyist for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root in February.

In lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Senate, Allbaugh said his goal was to "educate the congressional and executive branch on defense, disaster relief and homeland security issues affecting Kellogg Brown and Root."
...
Allbaugh is also a friend of Michael Brown, director of FEMA who was removed as head of Katrina disaster relief and sent back to Washington amid allegations he had padded his resume -- which he denies.

A few months after Allbaugh was hired by Halliburton, the company retained another high-level Bush appointee, Kirk Van Tine.

Van Tine registered as a lobbyist for Halliburton six months after resigning as deputy transportation secretary, a position he held from December 2003 to December 2004.
...
Cheney's relationship with Halliburton
Halliburton continues to be a source of income for Cheney, who served as its chief executive officer from 1995 until 2000 when he joined the Republican ticket for the White House. According to tax filings released in April, Cheney's income included $194,852 in deferred pay from the company, which has also won billion-dollar government contracts in Iraq.
...

Before the body count is even reasonably guesstimated, or New Orleans pumped even half dry, the awarding contracts on the backs of the dead, dying and displaced to the same fucking group of Bush/Cheney Usual Crony Suspects has begun in earnest and in broad daylight.

Remember that these are the same bloody-handed banshees who have been keening about what a horrible heap of unseemly horribleness it is to point fingers. How awful it is to, y’know, hold people to account for the massive failures before, during and after Katrina...since about eleven seconds after it became abundantly clear that the lion’s share of this shitburger is going to land on a certain Big Boy Desk in the Oval Office.

So less than 300 hours after the levees broke it is somehow too disrespectfully soon to ask why the President of the United States failed his country so stupidly and utterly, but hardly soon enough to begin shoveling out lucrative contracts to Dick “House of Pain” Cheney’s former company and current nest egg -– the Thieves of Baghdad -- and to butt-nuzzling pals of Joe Allbaugh; Bush family fixer and apparently the oleaginous genius behind stocking the management of FEMA to the rafters with the likes of Mr. Ed’s Attorney-of-Record.

Yes, of course the government must retain the service of whole host of companies to help fix the city and the lives they helped destroy: that’s a given. But this, especially that last one –- pumping your tax dollars for cleanup and recovery out of the Treasury and directly into the change purse of one of the men who appears to bear no small measure of responsibility for this fuckup -- this goes so far beyond the typical Bush tone-deafness, stupidity and emotionally autistic detachment that simple fucktardery can't explain it.

This is a Bob Beaman broad jump straight into the heart of “We Really Just Don’t Fucking Care” terrority.

This is what happens when your criminality-and-denial reflexes have become so routinized, so completely automatic, that you literally can't smell your own moral stink anymore. And then a hurricane rips your roof off an all of the maggoty habits you have built up in private are suddenly dumped out into the glaring light. Your poll numbers drop like lemmings packing anvils. Your own Media Tribbles suddenly stop cooing and chirping, race right up your pants-leg and sink their tiny teeth into your sack. And yet you still can't dope out exactly why an overwhelming majoriy of the public is so pissed at you, so you keep right own showing your sticky ass on prime time teevee.

This has the reek of burglars making one, last slow pass to make sure they've picked the joint clean down to the nailheads before the cops show up. Of Visigoths, having completely sacked Rome, going back and razoring the change out of the pockets of the corpses they left behind just to make damned sure they took everything.

And it also just goes to show that as callous and lazy as the Bush White House is when it comes to the plight of the “least of these”, that is exactly how ruthless and efficient they are at hacking up and rendering down the disasters they visit on others into tidy little parcels of profit for for their loyal family retainers.

As was said of Chicago hog-butchers a century ago, if nothing else, when it comes to exploiting the misery and tragedy of others, the Bush Crime Family knows how to “use everything but the squeal.”