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

I have gone prompt and back for a during the time that a little while ago trying to figure exhausted where today’s rant should begin, but I find that I cannot possess past that disquisition. 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 etc. girl splayed out on her receptacle, giggling with her girlfriend about some hottie actor they the two venerate? I mean, what, exactly, was an applicant expected to say?

“I adore his strong chin?”

“That crinkly smile really turns me upon?”

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

Presumably, Goodling is somewhere doodling the president’s name and hers inside Valentine hearts space of time she awaits her fate. You see, she faces feasible professional sanctions against 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 candid that she asked a point that would have been more at domicile on the cover of Tiger Beat. It was that she passed over a respected prosecutor with almost 20 years of actual trial for an serious counterterrorism work at jobs since his partner was unremitting in Democratic politics, hiring instead a Republican by three years’ experience. And that she denied one applicant on the suspicion

It goes upon. And on. Goodling’s priority was not experience, talent or competence. Rather, she was looking for, as she put it in a note, applicants who were suitably conservative on “god, guns + gays.”

Yes, every president is entitled to stock political positions with loyalists. But these were “not,” I repeat, political positions. Rather they were, or were supposed to be delivered of been, career, nonpartisan jobs: immigration judges, assistant U.S. attorneys, trial attorneys.

The moot point is, in this administration, there’s no such thing as a nonpartisan job. For them, the campaign not at any time ends.

Just hold out month, another report set up applicants for DOJ internships and honors programs reality turned away for political reasons. Then there’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” which recounts how people interviewing to work in the Green Zone in Iraq were asked their opinion of Roe v. Wade, among other conservative litmus tests.

What does abortion political science have to do with turning on the electricity in Baghdad? Hey, you got me.

This administration prizes ideological purity above ability. As a result, it has driven the presidency off a cliff, the country following close behind. These are not people who came to government to govern. No, these are true believers who came to state to institutionalize true belief, to make it persistent as a imperfection.

There is something Stepford, something robotic and chilling, in the glassy-eyed, ends-justifies-the-means faith of these youthful Bush aides in their own righteousness. Forget credibility. Forget competence. Just give us your answer, please: “What is it in all parts of George W. Bush that makes you failure to serve him?”

It is a telling question. Apparently, these people have forgotten or never even knew: It wasn’t George W. Bush they were supposed to serve.

lpitts@miamiherald.com