Heckava Job

In early 2006 Bush Aide Claude Allen resigned. He was a domestic policy advisor and "the No. 2 official in the Health and Human Services Department when Bush nominated him in April 2003 to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, VA" It turns out in spite of his $160,000 salary he shoplifted (via fraudulent returns) from Target and Hecht, 25 times.

Now Karl Zinsmeister is the President's Domestic Policy Adviser, and Director of the Domestic Policy Council, which coordinates the domestic policy-making process in the White House. The New Republic has an article on him and it's quite damning. Before joining the administration he ran the American Enterprise Institutes magazine and apparently badly.

"Despite all this--the declining quality of his magazine, his questionable use of subscription sales to promote his own books, his unprofessional treatment of co-workers--Zinsmeister still had one thing going for him: his relationship with AEI President Christopher DeMuth.?

When he got the White House job "privately, many conservatives were stunned--and horrified. "Everyone who knows Karl that I've spoken to reacted with blatant shock," says a former editor at The American Enterprise. Another former staffer at the magazine told me that, after Zinsmeister's hiring, "the last vestige of confidence I had in the Bush administration--which wasn't very much--was shot to hell." A prominent neoconservative Washington journalist put it this way: "Everyone thought it was wacky."

Think Progress led with his quote about a female employee who apparently did good work but he didn't like, "I am never going to hire another woman because they just get pregnant and leave."

Heckava Job...