It’s something that our U.S. government has said a number of times in the past

When Bush announced his nomination of Harriet Miers, he said he’d consulted with many members of the Senate. Are we to believe that there was a single senator who suggested Miers? (“Proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection clause,” indeed).

Don’t know how I missed this story: a Georgia state senator, David Graves (R), claimed parliamentary immunity from a drunk driving charge (his second in a year) because he was driving home from a (boozy) dinner meeting with other legislators. Hey, it’s right there in the state constitution. He was embarrassed into withdrawing the defense, for which he blamed his lawyer, one William “Bubba” Head. Graves will also resign from a committee that oversees the regulation of the liquor industry, and promises, “You can rest assured that I will not make the same poor choices again.” I look forward to his new poor choices.

I had thought I wasn’t going to pile on to Karen Hughes for her claim that Saddam Hussein “murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas.” After all, everyone can misspeak; for example the WaPo itself, reporting this, says, “at least 300,000 Iraqis are reported to have died during Hussein’s 24 years in office” when it meant that that many were killed by the government. But Hughes (in Indonesia) continued to demonstrate the depth of her understanding when asked how she came up with the number: “It’s something that our U.S. government has said a number of times in the past. ... That’s something I said every day in the course of the campaign. That’s information that we talked about a great deal in America.” And “I think it was almost 300,000. It’s my recollection,” adding helpfully, “They were put in mass graves.”

Really, I think Miers, Rice and Hughes show how much progress this country has made. It used to be that for a woman to succeed in “a man’s world,” she had to be twice as good and work twice as hard. But these women, while only half as good... wait, that doesn’t work, cuz they’re still smarter than Bush.

Caption contest: Karen Hughes in Indonesia.