From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

”What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?”

I have gone forward and back for a while now trying to figure out where today’s rant should begin, but I find that I cannot get past that question. It was posed by Monica Goodling, an aide to then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, to job seekers at the Department of Justice.

“What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?”

Is it me, or doesn’t she sound less like a job interviewer than like an adolescent girl splayed out on her bed, giggling with her girlfriend about some hottie actor they both adore? I mean, what, exactly, was an applicant expected to say?

“I adore his strong chin?”

“That crinkly smile really turns me on?”

“I can’t resist the manly twinkle in his eyes when he mispronounces ‘nuclear?’ ”

Presumably, Goodling is somewhere doodling the president’s name and hers inside Valentine hearts while she awaits her fate. You see, she faces possible professional sanctions for violations of both civil-service law and the DOJ’s own policy. As detailed last week in a Justice Department report, she and other aides systematically schemed to fill nonpolitical positions with Bush loyalists.

It wasn’t just that she asked a question that would have been more at home on the cover of Tiger Beat. It was that she passed over a respected prosecutor with almost 20 years of experience for an important counterterrorism job because his wife was active in Democratic politics, hiring instead a Republican with three years’ experience. And that she denied one applicant on the suspicion — the “suspicion,” mind you — that she was a lesbian. And that she jettisoned yet another because he was a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. And that she ran Internet searches to determine applicants’ political views. And that one of her interview questions was: “Why are you a Republican?”

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