This is what is takes to get Congress outraged and off its ass about misspending? Seriously?

Lawmakers expressed outrage Wednesday over a federal audit report that debit cards handed out to hurricane victims last year were used to buy such items as a $200 bottle of champagne from Hooters and $300 worth of "Girls Gone Wild" videos.

Something like $50 billion was distributed to private companies in Iraq with little-to-no oversight, and a large chunk of it is unaccounted for. But some Katrina evacuee spending $400 on gold chains is "an affront to the American taxpayer"?

Don't get me wrong, government waste is always a bad thing. Thousands went wanting for necessities, and some are still homeless, while others have had government cash to splurge. There surely could have been better oversight of how aid was distributed and what it was spent on.

But are we seriously calling them "these criminals"? Someone who has lost everything they own and been displaced to a foreign city isn't exactly thinking rationally, and I'm not going to judge them if they thought some booze and porn was what they needed to cope. Who knows what the hell I might have spent that money on if Chicago had, I don't know, burned to the ground. I'm not exactly responsible with my income right now.

And, more to the point, it's not like these people are living high on the hog right now, whatever they chose to spend the money on at the time. You think anyone who lost all their worldly possessions last September is walking around with a bunch of diamond rings? Shit, even those Girls Gone Wild videos got sold back in March.

Call it racism, classism, whatever — you can see Rep. Michael McCaul just aching to break out a few "welfare queen" comments. The government can waste taxpayers' money by the billions, but God forbid a member of the underclass should engage in a little misspending of their own.