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From Wednesday's Countdown, with guest host Rachel Maddow (MSNBC, for pity's sake, give this woman a show already!), we give you the latest in the never-ending list of scandals that is the Bush administration:

First up, the truth that proves the lie that the private sector handles government functions more efficiently than the government could. Turns out, not so much...in fact there is currently a backlog of more than 900 cases languishing alleging federal contractors defrauding the federal government because the Justice Department could not keep pace with the number of whistleblowers coming forward.

"Even if no new cases are filed, it might take 10 years for the Department of Justice to clear its desk. Cases in the backlog represent a lot of money being left on the table," said Patrick Burns, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, which advocates for Justice to receive more funding to support cases by whistle-blowers and their attorneys.

Supporters of federal intervention in the cases say the dividends are substantial: In recent years, verdicts and settlements have returned nearly $13 billion to the U.S. government.

And that's just for the 100 or so cases on average per year that Justice has been able to litigate. Forget Iraqi oil, seems like if the DoJ could actually keep pace with all the fraud, we could finance the Iraqi War with the proceeds, or at least put a significant chunk of the national debt away.

Next up is the disturbing variation of IOKIYAR where it turns out that military trainers arrived in Guantanamo for interrogation training with a class based entirely on a Chinese treatise on how to elicit propaganda fodder through torture of US troops during the Korean conflict. Maddow:

That chart was taken from an article called, “Communist Attempts To Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” This was a study of how the Chinese tortured propaganda fodder out of Americans in the Korean War. Prolonged standing, exposure to cold, all that ‘enhanced interrogation’ stuff? We called it torture when the Chinese did it to our guys in Korea. And we know it produces false confessions. So why are we using these techniques?

I hope that the administration remembers this before they work themselves up into any lather over mistreatment of our soldiers in the Middle East...we can hardly hold them to higher standards than we hold for ourselves. And finally, and most poetically, it turns out that the politicization and careful hiring practices of the DoJ, as described by Gonzales' protege Monica Goodling and Bradley Schlozman, has put the DoJ in a bit of a bind, because you see...it was illegal. And now who is left to represent the DoJ but those idiots who passed their ideology and partisan thresholds. Oops.