In a development a cynical person might dismiss as inevitable, the Army Corps of Engineers has expanded their mission to make a bungle of everything they touch to our very own state of Georgia. When water restrictions get tighter this summer, you can thank the incompetent bureaucrats at the Corps for mistakenly releasing 22 billion gallons of water from Lake Lanier.

First of all, blaming the blunder on a faulty gauge is like blaming the crash of the Mars lander on using metric instead of U.S. units – it explains why it happened, but you still end up looking like the Keystone Kops in the end. Joe Taxpayer didn't say “Oh, silly them, they used the wrong units”, he said “Remind me why we're paying these fools.” After the ludicrous farce that masqueraded as a response to Hurricane Katrina, I think it's safe to say that this is just another thread in a glorious tapestry of ineptitude and incompetence being woven by the Corps.

Secondly, we have this telling comment (quoted by the AJC) from a Corps spokesman, in response to the Lake Lanier Association's insistence that it tried repeatedly to tell the Corps that water in the lake was lower than they thought:

Robbins said his office in Mobile had not received the reports that the lake level was lower than managers thought.

Gee, I wonder why that might be? Could it possibly be that the Corps is in fact a bloated, putrefying swamp of bureaucracy and buck-passing, making it impossible for anything short of Armageddon (I'm assuming that they'll get the clue when the star opens the gate to the abyss and the waters turn to blood, but maybe I'm being optimistic) to penetrate the Byzantine maze of blather also known as the “chain of command”? The Corps is a total joke, and even “Sunny” Perdue isn't laughing anymore.

It's bad enough that we've got idiots running our nation and our state. Why do we have to let these clowns make hash of Atlanta's water supply too?