Bury Me Broken

Ignatius in Wonderland -or- David the Conjurer

Right wing pundit's sleight-of-keyboard sorcery knows no bounds and David Ignatius was no exception in his PC prestidigitation, "Meet the New Elite".

With the nomination of Princeton and Yale Law grad Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, I'm beginning to sense a theme in the Bush administration's rocky second term: We are witnessing the rise of the Republican A students. The preppy frat boy is gradually assembling a government of GOP meritocrats.

Alito is as pedigreed a member of America's new aristocracy of brains as you could hope to find. After Princeton and Yale, he punched all the right tickets: circuit court clerk, assistant U.S. attorney, assistant to the solicitor general, Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, U.S. attorney and then a spot as an appellate judge.

The president's new court nominee follows his supremely credentialed choice for chief justice. John G. Roberts was a grad of Harvard and Harvard Law, then made the grand tour of elite law jobs as a Supreme Court clerk, associate White House counsel and deputy solicitor general. What was striking during Roberts's confirmation process was that all of Washington's other A students, Republican and Democratic, seemed to know and like him.

Ignatius pauses in his conjuring of Bush's second term strategy of nominating those of exceptional scholarship for a brief paragraph on the failed Miers nomination with apologia:

You can argue that this is excellence by default, and that the president's first instincts were shown in the nomination of Harriet Miers. But Miers herself was no slouch in the resume department, with a trailblazing role as the first female president of the State Bar of Texas. In fact, the only job she arguably wasn't qualified for was the Supreme Court.

So as long as he is nominating A students, whether they are qualified is immaterial. Okay. Moving on.

He then lists other second term appointments nominating for their impressive scholarship

• Robert Zoellick, #2 at State, in that he was Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore and magna cum laude from Harvard Law.
  It couldn't have anything to do with the Brotherhood of the Neocon Quest, Zoellick being a signee of Project for a New American Century [PNAC] 1998 letter to President Clinton for military action against Saddam Hussein and whose organizational membership included Bush administration officials Cheney, the indicted Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, now at World Bank, Rumsfeld and Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.

• Gordon England, #2 at Defense, in that he "studied electrical engineering at the non-Ivy University of Maryland, but his brains catapulted him to positions on the Defense Science Board and as executive vice president of General Dynamics."
  Never mind the fact that he just argued against what he said to be the theme he sensed for the second Bush term.

• John Negroponte, a "a graduate of Yale and former ambassador to everywhere."
  Bush graduated from Yale so we are really moving away from the 'sensed theme' of A students.
  

To his credit, Ignatius highlights Fed chairman choice, Princeton economist Bernard Bernanke and says the selection"pleased even the Bushophobic Paul Krugman, a fellow Princeton professor. In choosing Bernanke, Bush went for the smart guy with the fancy resume in preference to more reliably conservative economists."

Well Ignatius the Great, I would differ with you as to strategy of Bush appointments and nominees. As with Porter Goss, John Bolton and John Negroponte, we are seeing Bush's patriarchal mantle as reformer. As with Alberto Gonzalez, Condoleeza Rice, Karen Hughes, again Porter Goss and a host of others, it is Bush's rewarding his loyalists and surrounding himself with those that not only do not dissent, but find extraordinary, law stretching ways to author assent. Still with others, such as FEMA director Michael Brown or former FDIC director Powell named to head long term hurricane disaster recovery efforts, it is cronyism because "ya dance with them what brung ya."

And many of those roles and reasons stem from the first term successful Bush strategy of being as malleable as silly putty and the perfect instrument with which to play out the Right Wing coup de grace of neocon dominance, Republicans as the "permanent major party," and middle and less than middle class in this country as America's permanent pack mules.

Ignatius the Stupendous ended with absolutely nothing up his sleeve:

President Bush -- despite his own Andover and Yale pedigree -- still does a surprisingly good job of sounding like an outsider.

Puhleeze.

posted by niteskolar @ 7:46 PM