What it is really going to be like in Washington DC next year

Great article by Tony Blakely in Washington Times.

"Blood in the Potomac" indeed. Your tax dollars at work.

If you think the fighting has been rough in Fallujah, wait until you see Washington in the springtime. President Bush's early personnel decisions for the second term suggest that he is preparing, unilaterally, to take on not only our foreign enemies, but also the Democrats and Washington's most cunning and vicious bureaucracies-all at the same time.

With the nominations of Condoleezza Rice at State, Porter Goss at CIA, Donald Rumsfeld (or an equally tough replacement) at Defense and Stephen Hadley at NSC, the president has created an all-Patton foreign and defense team. Moreover, he has a team that understands that among the necessary targets of their firepower must be, not only our foreign enemies, but also the slouching, sly, insubordinate bureaucrats under their chain of command.

While we know less about the president's domestic staffing, the appointment of loyalist Alberto Gonzales at Justice suggests that he, too, will be in hand to hand combat with the fourth of Washington's Bureaucratic Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Justice, State, CIA and Defense. On the day after Mr. Gonzales's nomination, I was told by an old Justice Department hand, that they were going to "eat Gonzales alive." I know these people. They mean it. He better go over there with a battle-hardened Washington team. The only thing those senior 'crats respect is the cold-hearted exercise of brutal power by their political master. The battle at Justice will be similar to our battles in the Middle East. Any gestures of goodwill or cooperation by Mr. Gonzales will be seen as weakness and will have the same effect on the bureaucrats that blood has on the nostrils of a shark.