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Meet the New Boss
 It took a little longer this time for George W. Bush’s lifelong pattern of abject failure followed by parental rescue to kick in this time, but in the past he’s had only a few million dollars of other people’s money to squander. In his latest venture as leader of the free world, he’s trashed the Constitution, put every man, woman, and child in the country into crushing debt, and got a lot of innocent folks killed in the process. That took a little longer than bankrupting an incompetently-run fourth-rate oil company.
So, the same yutz who traded Sammy Sosa stuck by Donald Rumsfeld until his father got him on the horn and said enough is enough. Destroying a couple centuries of liberal democracy is one thing, but taking the Republican Party down with it was just too much for the old guard to stomach.
 Rumsfeld’s replacement as Sec’y of Defense, Robert M. Gates, is a Bush 41 vassal, his Director of Central Intelligence, and the gifted visionary who dismissed perestroika in the former Soviet Union as “a fad.” He was first nominated to become DCI by Ronald Reagan in 1987, but withdrew when it became clear that his role in the Iran-Contra criminal enterprise, as well as his cozy relationship with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, raised too many uncomfortable questions as to his fitness for the job. Somehow none of that mattered anymore when he was re-nominated for the CIA post by Bush 41 in 1991.
Gates, currently the president of Texas A&M University, the home of the George HW Bush Presidential Library, and a member of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, brings a storied career of sycophancy and duplicity to the job. He’s the perfect candidate to sit in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and tell them what they want to hear. Which won't be difficult anyway. He'll be grilled on Iraq by all the same rubber stamps who voted for the war, and continue to support it. They're just happy somebody said yes to the job. Gates declined the Intelligence Tsar post last year; this time Poppy must have called in all his chits. . .
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