On, like, totally questionable nominations

Okay, so we all pretended to be surprised when Bush announced that he was bringing in none other than Condoleezza Rice to fill the SecState position gladly vacated by Colin Powell. This is the woman who was able to stare down the barrel of a memo titled "Bin Laden determined to Attack Inside the United States" and come to the conclusion that, hey, bin Laden wasn't going to, like, attack or anything, certainly not inside the United States. And then she had the balls to lie about it under oath, and while I'm normally all about (rhetorical) balls on a woman, they are a power that should be used for good and not evil. But we only really feigned surprise about her nomination, 'cause we'd already had one term with Bush in office and this seemed like exactly the kind of thing that he'd do.

Then came the announcement that the proposed replacement for John "All Your Ovary Are Belong to Us" Ashcroft would be Alberto "Big Al" Gonzales, the former Bush advisor who told him that the whole torture thing was, like, totally legal and ethical and is now giving us the faaaaaar more palatable option of exporting our prisoners so we don't have to torture them our ownselves. This was more of a shock because it came at a time when, hello, we were under fire for our treatment of detainess, and hello, scrutiny hasn't exactly let up since the initial wackiness at Abu Ghraib. And while I must admit that his confirmation came as a bit of a surprise to me, it is just par for the course with Bush (who surrounds himself with people who tell him he's right) and the Republican-heavy Congress (who, as wel all know, are so far up his behind that they can't see daylight).

Then came the nomination of John R. Bolton as US ambassador to the UN. This is, of course, similar to appointing Bill O'Reilly to head the ACLU; this is the guy who once said that "if the UN secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." And am I surprised? I am not! And not just because this is par for the course.

This is merely one more aspect of Bush's groundbreaking strategy of destroying all of these villages in order to save them. At first, it was just Iraq, which he bombed to hell and back in order to bring peace and democracy and purple fingers and cuddly puppies. We all know that he's intent on destroying Social Security in order to save it - so intent, in fact, that he's taking 60 days off of his president gig (which, in his defense, was more of a part-time deal anyway) to tour the country convincing the American people to give Social Security a nice pimp slap as he brought it down. And he spends so much time clearing brush in Crawford that he's got to have designs on clearcutting the family ranch.

But this one, this is more ambitious. This is obviously the next phase in his plan to bring democracy and fluffy clouds to the whole world - and what better way to save the world than to destroy it, bit by bit, starting with the UN? This presidency is going to go down in history. Assuming, y'know, that there actually is history when he gets done with it.