After months of miscues and false starts the Bush administration has achieved consensus as to the greatest threat facing America. From the White House perspective the principal danger is personified in one man: a wily, clever, resourceful foe who serves the cause of troublemakers everywhere, and stands as a living rebuke to our President and all who believe in him. In short, Colin Powell.
 
There is such a thing as being too principled, you know.
 
The President, vice-president and Secretary of Defense successfully sandbagged the increasingly disconsolate Secretary of State through subtle intimations that key Middle East players could ignore him with impunity. Thus the normally self-assured and impressive General saw his authority reduced to that of a latrine orderly.
 
The war on Powell's self-esteem ratcheted up another notch when Mr. Rumsfeld, recalling that he is, after all, the head of the Defense Department, demoted the hapless warrior to the rank of Sergeant and placed him on permanent KP.
 
Speaking of retrenchment, a recent news item reminded us of the old Gene Autry song, "Can't Shake the Sands of Texas from My Shoes." Yup, pardners, Miss Karen's a-saddlin' up the ol' cayuse -- or being saddle up by the ol' cayuse, the announcement wasn't terribly clear -- and lopin' back to the ranch house, longin' for a sweet meal a' beans and fatback, just like any other lonesome buckaroo.
 
Ms. Hughes' resignation is expected to have a pronounced and deleterious effect on White House operations, inasmuch as her departure effectively reduces the collective intelligence of the Presidency by approximately 50%, leaving only adviser Karl Rove to uphold the remainder.
 
The Oval Office won't seem the same somehow without her despotic sincerity, to say nothing of the cheerful sounds she used to make by banging her iron fists together.
 
The soon-to-be missing-in-action Hughes is only one of the problems facing the President in the detumescent afterglow of his post-attack popularity. In this week's epic, "With Friends Like These," he reviews the parade of dissatisfactions that have taken some of the fun out of his job.
 
In other news, as has been widely reported, the President, speaking on the subject of American voluntarism, was recently heard to say:
 
"And so, in my State of the - my State of the Union - or state - my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation - I asked Americans to give 4,000 years - 4,000 hours over the next - the rest of your life - of service to America,"
 

Typically, the tax-and-spend, card-carrying, knee-jerk liberal press rushed to denigrate the Commander-in-Chief. What they did not report, however, was that our Leader was recovering from an exhausting medical procedure, having only recently returned from his annual brain re-glazing (it's all smooth and shiny again!), and was therefore unable to speak with even his usual clarity.
 
Oh, and plug time: be sure to rush over to Liberal Slant this week, where you'll find a joint journalistic effort by Lisa Kadonaga and the undersigned, in which we cast a cold eye on a hot new Vanity Fair photo essay on the Bush Administration. Come, share the horror with us in "War and the Destiny Thing."
 
Finally, this bit of social observation: people who live in glass houses have higher laundry bills.
 
As they say in the West Wing: that's oil, pals!
 
Hank