Friday evening, December 10^th, Bob Patterson, known here as the World’s Laziest Journalist, sent me this note.

Tonight the top story on the New York Times site is that Bernard Kerik has withdrawn his name for consideration as the Fatherland Security Chief.

Seems that there are some questions about the immigration status of a housekeeper and nanny that worked for him.

Why do we even bother to pay government employees to man the border crossings?

Couldn't we save some money and do just as well by taking them off the payrolls and let some guy on a phone in India ask some questions with a video hook-up?

Or just throw open the borders and let the Oklahoma land rush style come back into fashion?

The Times story, now updated, is here, and the MSNBC story with a great photograph is here.

This is all bull. 

Via Cursor.Org we see that after Newsday's Ellis Henican called Homeland Security nominee Bernard Kerik "a personal and professional time bomb the Bushies will learn to regret," the Village Voice's James Ridgeway urged Senators Schumer, Clinton and Kennedy to delay the canonization long enough to read Jimmy Breslin on 'Saint Bernard.'  Plus: 'Kerik's demanding of GOP loyalty cost city.'  The New York Times reports that confirmation would put Kerik 'Atop Field That Enriched Him,' and charts his connections to 'the Business of Security.'

The guy was Giuliani's chauffer, worked for the Saudi Royal family, and made millions on kickbacks from suppliers of security equipment - much more than the 6.2 million in stock options from the one company that had him on the board of directors, Taser International, that was in the news late in the week.

This nanny thing?  Pure cover. 

The guy is a bully, a narcissist and a thief. 

We already have one of those running the country.  We didn't need two.

Newsweek has a roundup of the beyond-the-nanny issues here.

Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, adds his regrets –

It's sort of a shame, since I was half looking forward to having some guy in the administration who, when taunted with the charge that "your mother's a whore," could respond with something like, "Yeah? So, where you going with that?"  Kerik's mother actually WAS a prostitute, who abandoned him when he was young.  Unfortunately, this guy was becoming famous for playing this "my mom was a whore" thing for way more than it was worth.

Also, after scanning the Times front page story this morning, I started thinking this guy had more than a bit too much to answer for in his confirmation hearings, and that the Bush gang had chewed off more than they could swallow this time.  This thing was destined to be much bigger than Clinton's Nannygate.

Bob Patterson?

His mom did what?  What's happening during the second term?  Where are the family values folks on this résumé checking detail?

Gad-zooks!

Rick in reply –

She was apparently an actual prostitute!

Which is no big deal in itself, but I speculate that we might not even know of this little bit of his heritage if he didn't run around bragging about it, which itself is something in his character that I would find questionable if I myself were considering his confirmation. There are a number of things about this guy that don't seem to sit right, and I personally would have wanted to take care before voting for him.

Oh, heck.  They missed this too:

Bernard Kerik, the man tasked with protecting the United States from the threat of terrorist attacks, fathered a daughter with a South Korean woman while serving on the peninsula in the mid-1970s, U.S. media reported over the weekend.

Kerik, who was selected to replace Tom Ridge as secretary of the Homeland Security Department on Thursday, had the baby with a woman identified as Sun-ja after arriving in South Korea as a 19-year-old military policeman in December 1974, according to several reports.

The baby, named Lisa, was born in 1975. But Kerik deserted her and her mother when he left the country in February 1976.

This wasn’t going to work.

Oh, and his nickname, Mr. Clean?