THE LOW POST: Your Tax Dollars at Work

>>Talk back to Taibbi -- and see a complete archive of The Low Post.

There are small news stories, there are really small news stories, and then there is "Defense Institute Head Resigns," a little maggot of a news item that blipped into the "D" section of the Washington Post last Wednesday. Three-hundred-fifty-six words in all, about half the length of an AP NFL game account, and the Post was the only paper in the country that ran the story. So how important could it have been?

Actually, the Post item about the resignation of Dennis C. Blair from the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) spoke volumes about the utter insanity of the modern American media landscape. In a month when Katie Couric redefined the "scoop" as an advance glimpse of celebrity idiot-spawn Suri Cruise, and investigative journalism according to muckracking icon 60 Minutes meant sappy profiles of Howard Stern and Bill Romanowski, it made all the sense in the world that the denouement of a spectacular tale of massive government waste and fraud would go completely unnoticed by virtually the entire journalism community.

The name of Dennis C. Blair became somewhat infamous on the Hill this summer when he became wrapped up in a minor controversy surrounding appropriations for the F-22 Raptor jet fighter. Blair, a former Navy admiral who once headed the U.S. Pacific Command, was until last week the president of the IDA, a federally funded nonprofit research center which provides the government with "independent" analyses of weapons programs and defense legislation.

Earlier this year, the IDA had been asked by the Pentagon to assess the viability and potential cost of a three-year, $60-plus billion Multi-Year Procurement (MYP) of F-22 jets. The details here are complicated, but in essence the MYP -- proposed as an amendment to the Senate's 2007 Defense Authorization bill by Georgia's Saxby Chambliss -- would lock the government into a bulk purchase of three years' worth of F-22s, instead of the traditional yearly individual purchases.

Blair's IDA did as ordered, ultimately issuing a report showing that the MYP, by allowing suppliers to sell to the government at reduced bulk rates, would save the government a quarter of a billion dollars. This contradicted the findings of both the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service, which blasted the procurement as an indefensibly stupid waste of money, but the IDA's "congressionally mandated independent study" (as Chambliss called it) was the one legislators chose to listen to.