And so it begins…

Almost on cue (commenter Miss Authoritiva questioned if “the corporatists” who run the world might want to knock the Bushmen down a notch or two lest they take the nation over the edge, and hence, be bad for business) Homeland Security Secretary nominee Bernard Kerik abruptly withdrew his name from nomination. The stated reason is that he was a middle class person who had children. Therefore, he had domestic help, and therefore, said domestic help was (1) off the books and (2) of “questionable” immigration status. And therefore, Kerik can’t be a cabinet officer.
Kerik becomes the first man of whom I’m aware to have had this happen (Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood and Linda Chavez were previous nanny-no-no cabinet-dropouts).
In Kerik’s case, of course, this is as transparent an excuse as Governor Jim McGreevy’s outing himself as gay. There are more skeletons in Mr. Kerik’s closet than in a mid-size catabomb, including his “service” as security director in a Saudi hospital, or his “service” as Corrections Commissioner of our fair city, where he evidently stood watch while over a million dollars “went missing” (for which a foundation director went to jail), or his “service” as police commissioner, where he used on-duty police homicide detectives to investigate the loss of his publisher’s cell-phone or to perform research for his “autobiography”, or his more recent “service” as police consultant for Iraq, where he abruptly left halfway through his 6 month term (declaring victory and leaving).
Frankly, if you ask me, Kerik discovered that now that Dubya has been safely reelected, the teflon is beginning to wear, and those nearby will not get the same carte blanche they enjoyed in term I. Hence, Kerik grasped at anything that would permit him to withdraw before the really embarassing shit came to light.
And here we are. Obviously, this could just be a clever subterfuge by our Chinese overlords to veto a nominee suggested by our Saudi overlords (recall that Rosalind Chao, a cabinet retention, abruptly replaced Linda Chavez as Labor Secretary, for similar reasons to Kerik), and hence, a one-off, or this could be the state of things to come: the teflon is off, and Dubya’s smirk will soon be wiped off his face.
Time will tell. The only thing we know for sure is that our national economics are heading off of a cliff.