America loves a good scandal. Look at our political history, which is pockmarked with events most nations would much rather forget: Teapot Dome. Kennedy and Monroe. Watergate. Clinton. Our national pastime, baseball, has smudges all over it, from the Chicago Black Sox to Pete Rose's bookie to the overinflated biceps of Barry Bonds. Even that great exporter of Western culture, Hollywood, wouldn't be half as attractive as it appears to be were it not for all the dirt under its highly polished nails.


For some reason, the people of this country like to get right in there and wallow shoulder-deep in someone else's muck. Maybe it's a psycho-defense mechanism, the same thing that forces us to laugh at the hilarity of others' misfortune. It must be an expression of our humanity, a gladness that cannot be bridled - something bad happened, but it didn't happen to me.


What is to be made, then, of the post-invasion discoveries regarding the U.N. sponsored Oil For Food program? The intentions were initially noble enough; the idea was that the regime of Saddam Hussein could sell its oil only in exchange for funding to feed the Iraqi people. After all, they were the only ones suffering from the constrictive sanctions placed on that country after the Gulf War of the early 1990's, sanctions largely imposed at the behest of the first Bush administration. The Iraqi people for years scratched out a socialist subsistence, living on a daily basket consisting basically of soda crackers and cigarettes.


As many a noble project has done, this one transformed into a scandal. Saddam was siphoning off the cash, some ten billion dollars they say, and other countries were profiting from his graft by laundering the oil money through a series of channels that spanned the globe, from the Swiss Alps to the island of Seychelles. Since the 2003 toppling of Saddam, conservative commentators have taken great delight in bashing the U.N. over Oil For Food. Even people of supposed impartiality, like retired General Tommy Franks (who coined the phrase "Oil For Palaces") got in on the act.


New York Times columnist William Safire indicted U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's son as one who chiefly benefitted from the scandal. The National Review published a column by one Claudia Rosett titled "Oil For Terror", stretching with all the might of a yoga instructor to connect the U.N. to Osama bin Laden. An editorial in the surrealistic Washington Times ran a list of the guilty, mostly citizens of countries they don't like (in other words, France).


The CIA accused Russia of participating in the swindle, according to National Public Radio. Having learned so much from their American diplomatic counterparts, in the great spirit of glasnost, the Russians flat out denied the assertions. Investigation upon investigation began, with documents being shredded not out of stealth but simply by virtue of the number of pompously pious hands grasping for them simultaneously.


The ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation made the time to praise Congress, of all do-nothing organizations, for their part in trying to shed light on the truth of the matter. In the process, they outright accused the United Nations of helping to "prop up the Iraqi dictator". Further, they urged Congress to "withhold a portion of U.S. funds for the U.N. unless it is completely satisfied that the U.N. is fully cooperating with the various Oil-for-Food inquiries and is undertaking effective measures to reform itself."


That's a great idea. Hurt the entire world in one fell swoop. Hearts and minds, people; hearts and minds.


None of this even accounts for the millions of cubic metric tons of carbone dioxide that have been expelled into the atmosphere by those right-wing philosophers of ignorance, AM radio talk show hosts. Blame it all on the Old Europe lefties; it's easy money.


So who was the first person to be convicted of a crime in the U.N. Oil For Food scandal? Whose improprieties have left him facing 28 years in prison? A fellow named Samir Vincent, a naturalized American from Iraq who lives in Annandale, Virginia. Not a Frog, not a Kraut, not a Russkie, but an American, driven by the capitalist greed that is the hallmark of this country. It must have seeped through his flesh and into his soul like so much Potomac mercury.


I've got fifty bucks that says he's a registered Republican who voted for George W. Bush. Twice.