The next time someone talks about the long, proud tradition of public service that envelops the Bush family, feel free to guffaw and fall out of your chair.

Eleven of the top 18 officials on the agency's organizational chart a year ago have been fired, forced out or quit, and more could leave soon under an ongoing overhaul that Bush has described as a "reboot." In their place, Bush has given top jobs to two of his law school classmates, two relatives of members of two Bush presidential administrations and at least three others with ties to the family or other political leaders. In all, Bush has hired at least 29 people who worked on his campaign or have political connections, according to a review of thousands of pages of personnel records. The agency did not advertise any of the openings publicly.

This is a clan the members of which have a sense of entitlement that runs so deeply in the gene pool that it's almost a kind of autonomic reflex. Whatever they do is righteous because they do it. The national interest is their interest, and vice versa. Eventually, here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), the WASP elite gave in to the changing demographic pressures that forced a more democratic form of local corruption on the system. This is an accommodation that the Bush family never has reached with reality. I think the country perhaps has had enough of them for a while.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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