Political patronage, in the sense of secretly favouring protoges or fellow members of your party is perhaps an inevitable phenomenon, true.
Openly asking applicants for essentially non-political jobs wether they voted for Bush or what their stance on abortion is goes a bit further then just political patronage. This is a rather outstanding case rather then just another addition to a list of rather minor corruption.

If one imagines what damage this could (and maybe has) caused to rebuilding Iraq, one could almost label this as criminal negligence