Kerik withdraws his nomination

Now comes my first foray into political blogging. That didn't take long.

Bernard Kerik, the former commissioner of the NYPD, recently nominated by President Bush to be the next Director of Homeland Security, has just withdrawn himself from the confirmation process. Apparently, he balked right when his background check was getting down to the nitty-gritty. Damn, I wonder what this guy has to hide. My first thought when I saw him was that he looked like a thug, and I don't mean that in the way that a lot of people use the word "thug" to describe any one of the countless number of ruthless political hacks whose faces are constantly shifting in and out of wide circulation; I mean that when Bush announced his nomination a week ago, this guy stepped up to the podium with Bush looking like he could very well have been freshly returned from dumping a guy's corpse in a hole somewhere in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

Kerik has the face of a permanently disgruntled interior lineman with the body to match. Frankly, I thought he was a good choice - what with the DHS always acting like its main function is to rough up members of any demographic that might make Fox News viewers uncomfortable - a visual match made in heaven for an administration that has taken "style over substance" to a new level. But I digress (though only by way of setting up the gist of this post)...

What was so bad about this thug that the Bushies weren't even willing to wait and try to deal with it at the confirmation hearings? The way I see it, it had to be an internal decision. Consider:

1) If the Democrats knew that Kerik had a rotting corpse in his closet, they would have waited until the hearings and used it to rip Bush like a bottle of cheap vodka.

2) Kerik's supposed reason for withdrawing his name - that he just discovered during the process of background checks that he "might have" employed an illegal alien as a housekeeper - isn't bad enough, at least on its own, to ruin his chances of being nominated (He's not Zoe Baird, after all).

These two things lead me to believe that the White House didn't find out about whatever it was that's occasioned today's events until after they'd already nominated Kerik, and apparently they thought it was bad enough to tell him to resign and cite a bogus reason for fear the Democrats would find out (or perhaps they thought the Democrats already knew).

I hope some reporter from the Times has nothing better to do over the weekend than dig up some dirt. I'm researching a term paper on Plato's ethics and half-hoping that Kerik pays me a visit.