A few years ago, while pleading poverty on many other things, the Ohio State University (OSU) found money for a massive renovation of Ohio Stadium. They added club seats and luxury skyboxes. Gone were the Stadium Dormitory, which once provided non-luxury accommodations for scholarship students, and the stadium’s track, where OSU alumnus Jesse Owens had once competed. Total seating capacity increased by almost 20,000. Construction took more than a year and cost almost $200 million, or roughly $10,000 per additional seat.

The stadium renovation was controversial at the time, because there are so many other things that could have been done with that much money. For example, you could pay for a single day of the war in Iraq.

Maybe the Bush Administration can learn from OSU, which sells “naming rights” to parts of the stadium and other facilities. Just think of the branding potential — every day, on every network, in every newspaper, we would hear reports like this:

Today in the Halliburton War in Iraq, dozens of Iraqi civilians were killed when a terrorist truck bomb exploded just blocks from the Hilton Hotels Green Zone. Meanwhile, sectarian violence raged in a village just north of ExxonMobil Baghdad.

You can’t buy that kind of blanket exposure — at least, not until the Administration starts auctioning naming rights. Don’t you suppose someone would pay a pretty penny to own the raid that killed terrorist al-Zarqawi? How does “the Microsoft airstrike on Zarqawi” sound? Ka-ching!

Of course, when it comes to real money, OSU and its piddling $200 million just isn’t in the game. Warren Buffett recently pledged $31 billion to charity through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. With that much money, he could have bought five whole months of war — enough to stretch from the unsuccessful AT&T Regime Decapitation Airstrike of March 20, 2003 to the Lockheed-Martin “Mission Accomplished” photo-op of May 1, 2003, with more than three months to spare.

Instead, Buffett decided to spend it fighting poverty, ignorance, starvation and disease. That’s all well and good, I suppose, but where’s the zazz? Where’s the earth-shattering Kaboom?

Bush and Cheney have different priorities. Forget poverty, ignorance, starvation and disease. Expect no shortage of earth-shattering Kabooms.