The original Bush gangstas

I have to take brief exception to this post by Ezra Klein. When Bush's first appointments were named, I was, like, seven years old, so (with the exception of the occasional knee-jerk reaction to the scandal of the day) I didn't give politics much thought. I read somewhere that Cheney had voted against making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday, so he seemed like a real prick, and talking heads seemed to agree that John Ashcroft was a party-line Republican with crazy religious views, so that seemed bad. But Paul O'Neil? Donald Rumsfeld? John Ashcroft? Who were these people? And that's to say nothing of the Miers/Gonzales, etc. White House.

As it turns out, they were not the country's best and brightest. They weren't event he Republican party's best and brightest. They were by and large a hodgepodge of cronies and forgotten party faithful from the Ford and Reagan presidencies. We were left with the impression that they were the natural hand of conservative governance, but that was more a case of establishment media giving little or no scrutiny to Republican figureheads than that these people were, in fact, unusually talented.

None of this is to say that Obama's picked the world's greatest legal mind to head the Justice Department, or the perfect economic team to rehabilitate the economy. Just that he seems to be concerned with more than simply handing over the executive branch to a bunch of people who won't complain when the White House creates horrible policy out of thin air.