Jim Hightower

The parade of Bushite bumblers, clowns, and incompetents just keeps coming!

There was Brownie from FEMA who did such "a heck of a job" with Hurricane Katrina. There's the embarassment of trying to put Harriet Myers on the Supreme Court. There's Alberto "See no evil" Gonzales who has hit the trifecta by confessing incompetence, being a liar, and clownishly demonstrating that he has the worst memory ever put inside a human head.

There are many more, but one of the silliest to come along in a while is Monica Goodling. She's the 33-year old, right-wing partisan who was involved in high-level hirings and firings at one of our country's most important agencies: the justice department. Her experience for this sensitive post? She had worked for the Republican Party, digging up dirt on Democrats running for office.

Goodling gleefully carried her partisan ferver into her government work, not only illegally questioning the party loyalties of applicants to top civil service jobs, but also rooting into their history of campaign contributions. Such political antics got her hauled before a congressional committee, where she performed the comical "I can't remember" routine that Gonzalez perfected.

Of course, the Bushites have now distanced themselves from Goodling, suggesting she was a rouge actor who was in over her head. But – hello – who put her there? It wasn't her legal brilliance that got her assigned to one of the top positions in the justice department – she was put there by the White House (most likely by Karl Rove) specifically to serve as a political hack.

The real clowns and bumblers are not Brownie, Harriet, Alberto, and Monica – but Bush himself, along with Karl, and Cheney. They are the appointers. They're the ones in charge. They form an arrogant triumverate that sees government not as a public trust, but as a force to march in lockstep with their partisan agenda – a place to plant hacks who'll loyally serve them, not the public interest.