The Fundies Surround the Throne

One of the things that we heard quite often from the few on the right that even bothered to be bothered by the all too apparent ineptitude of Bush was that we shouldn't worry much that he spoke like a brain-addled simpleton, behaved like a prurient frat boy, and had the attention span of goldfish because he was surrounding himself with the best and the brightest. After the dark years of Clinton, we should be happy that we had a middling executive, an MBA president, one who would build out a strong suite of MBA advisors to run the ship of state.

Woops.

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment.

So who surrounds the President these days? Meet Monica Goodling, who lately announced that she would take the fifth rather than incriminate herself for passing along false information to Deputy AG Paul McNulty before he testified before the Senate on the attorney general purge in February. (A quick note to the editorial board of the WSJ: if she did so, she committed a felony).

And the woman who is in the AGs office, making decisions over the fate of the Attorney Generals across the land, she's a proud graduate of Pat Robertson's Regent Law School, after a distinguished undergraduate career at Messiah University.

She's one of 150 graduates of Regent University in the Bush administration

Maybe not what they had in mind when they took it as an article of faith that the idiot king would surround himself with a wise old group of advisors.