To make up for losing the recent referendum for change in the nation's governance, the losers have come up with a snappy comeback: a coup.
Well, sort of a coup. The outgoing Bush administration is spiking the bureaucracy with political appointees who, through the miracle of executive fiat, have suddenly been transformed into civil servants.
As political operatives in the government's sundry bureaus, agencies and whatnot, they could have been chucked unceremoniously, and no doubt would have been, by the Obama administration. With the shape-shifters covered by Civil Service job protections, removing them will be as tough, and just about as much fun, as digging out ingrown toenails.
This process is not unknown. It has been around long enough to earn its own nickname — burrowing. But in the past it has been used mainly as a patronage hustle, a way to reward loyalists, not to thwart an incoming administration by confronting it with in-house opponents to the very policies on which the new president campaigned.
Patronage appears to have little to do with the Bush burrowing. Its practice is concentrated in offices where the Bush crew has focused its busiest damage to the public good, where it has played out its ideological wish list and where it has paid off its industrial constituency.
The Washington Post, which has been keeping track, has found high-level switches in the Labor and Interior departments, in the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, often involving personnel with records of overriding professional judgments with ideological purposes.
The shuffles have a definite Western lean, with authority over grazing rights, land use, drilling, mining and other, allied matters that have been a preoccupation of Vice President Dick Cheney, who has long ridden with the good-buddies posse of ranching, logging and mining interests.
The burrowing is of a piece with the Bush administration's high-energy effort to use executive orders and other pre-emptive instruments to get in last minute policy licks, especially against environmental protection. Typical winner: mountaintop strip mining. Typical loser: endangered species.
In the most recent twist, as a news story put it, "The Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing air-quality rules that would make it easier to build coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and other major polluters near national parks and wilderness areas, even though half of the EPA's regional administrators formally dissented from the decision and four others criticized the move in writing.''
Marry all that to our new crop of career bureaucrats, their partisan and doctrinal taints still vivid, and you have in sum a program of high cynicism toward the commonweal and the electorate.
President Bush is getting high marks for the grace and openness with which he is greeting President-elect Obama, and rightly so. But once again, we find that Bush is just a covering glad hand for the strong-arm administration behind it.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn@earthlink.net.