"L'État, c'est moi!"

You ask yourself, "How do fundamentally dishonest hacks like Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzales wind up nominated for membership in the president's cabinet?"

I think that this quote best sums up Mr. Bush's policy:

There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or, to put it more plainly, adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it …His vanity, which was perpetually nourished – for even preachers used to praise him to his face from the pulpit – was the cause of the aggrandizement of his Ministers.

That assessment applies as well to George W. Bush as it did to the Duc de Saint-Simon's original target: Louis XIV.