"What Team Bush has been doing is shrewd and lethal. They know that the news media—already swamped covering the Iraq story, the economy and male-pattern baldness—do not cover stories so minor as who gets appointed to the Reproductive Health Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration or who represents the United States (or what they say) at U.N. conferences on sustainable development and population growth. But like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, these aliens have colonized a host of boards, panels and delegations at home and abroad. While they’re not always successful in getting the rest of the world to agree that the best form of population control is to tie women’s legs together, they do slow down or derail the proceedings at hand.

"Consider just one part of the fundamentalist phalanx: the Bush appointees to the FDA’s reproductive health committee. They include Dr. David Hager, who opposes prescribing contraceptives to unmarried women, but does prescribe the reading of biblical scriptures to treat PMS. Also new to the committee is Dr. Joseph Stanford, who refuses to prescribe any contraceptives, period. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, whose anti-choice record as governor of Wisconsin made him a darling of the right, appointed abstinence-only ideologue Dr. Alma Golden to oversee the implementation of Title X, the country’s family-planning program. In September, Bush named a member of a group called—get this—“Virginity Rules,” one Dr. Freda McKissic Bush, to the Centers for Disease Control Advisory Committee on HIV and STD Prevention. The administration’s delegations to U.N. meetings include John Klink, former chief negotiator for the Vatican.

"Each appalling appointment, taken on its own, can seem like one individual concession to the Christian right that progressives must swallow. But taken together—and added to more newsworthy moves like Bush’s reinstatement of the “global gag rule,” which prohibits any health care providers who receive U.S. aid from talking about or providing abortions—we see a carefully coordinated jihad. Given the “war on terror” that allegedly targets Islamic extremists, it is peculiar that at U.N. conferences, the U.S. delegation colludes with Islamic fundamentalists to try to restrict contraception information, abortion and sex education.

"Most politicians around the world were impressed by the scale and intensity of last weekend's global protests against a probable war with Iraq.

Not President Bush.

"Size of protest — it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group," Mr. Bush said.

[...W]hile Mr. Bush may not like to acknowledge it, his administration does use focus groups, most recently to help determine how best to couch its public messages about domestic security.