Musical chairs.

George W. Bush is relying more heavily than ever on a tiny group of neoconservatives and loyalists, who are playing a game of musical chairs in Washington.

Paul Wolfowitz goes from the Pentagon to the World Bank.

Bush taps John Bolton to rise from his State Department post up to the United Nations.

Zalmay Khalilzad jumps from Kabul to Baghdad as U.S. ambassador.

When is the horrible music going to stop?

It's the score of the Project for the New American Century.

Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, and Bolton are all alums of the project, as are, not incidentally, Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff), and Donald Rumsfeld. This is the crew that is running the empire. All but Bolton signed the founding statement of the Project for the New American Century on June 3, 1997. It demanded that the United States "increase defense spending significantly" and "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values."

All but Cheney and Libby signed the project's January 26, 1998, letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to attack Iraq. And not the least of the reasons was that if Saddam got weapons of mass destruction, "a significant portion of the world's oil supply ... will be put at hazard." (That's a reminder that protecting oil supplies was, in fact, one of the reasons for the war.)

It is this clique that misled the country into war, not the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which were merely feeding the President the information he and these ideologues so desperately sought.

And despite all the lies, deceptions, and blunders of this palace guard, no one is held to account. Instead, they retain their positions or get promoted.

Wolfowitz now sits in the Robert McNamara memorial seat at the World Bank. As Reagan's ambassador to Indonesia, Wolfowitz cozied up to Suharto and helped oversee a disastrous liberalization of the Indonesian economy, which "plunged tens of millions into abject poverty," according to Jeffrey Winters, an associate professor of political economy at Northwestern University. If that is Wolfowitz's idea of development, the people of the Third World will be in for harder times.

But even more than his paltry experience on issues relating to development, Wolfowitz compiled a record as deputy secretary of defense that disqualifies him.

When the President's counterintelligence expert Richard Clarke tried to warn him about Osama bin Laden in a meeting in April 2001, Wolfowitz responded: "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden. ... You give bin Laden too much credit."

Wolfowitz was obsessed, instead, with Iraq, and in White House meetings immediately following September 11, it was Wolfowitz, more than anyone, who was advocating an attack on Saddam Hussein.

No friend of democracy, Wolfowitz urged the Turkish generals to go over the heads of the Turkish people and their democratically elected government to allow U.S. troops to station there for the invasion--a thinly veiled invitation for a coup.

He admitted that the decision to focus on the issue of weapons of mass destruction was a bureaucratic one, but that didn't stop him from hyping the case. When the war began, he falsely claimed that U.S. troops had found mobile biological vans.

Wolfowitz also grossly underestimated what it would take to occupy Iraq, infamously dismissing the assessment of Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki that it would take 200,000 troops as "wildly off the mark" and saying that U.S. troops would be greeted the same way that the liberators from the Nazis were. Wolfowitz told Congress that by six months after the invasion, the level of U.S. troops could be drawn down to 30,000. He was wrong by a factor of five.

He was even more off on the costs of the occupation. He predicted that the price tag would be only a few billion dollars, and after that the occupation would be "self-financing," as he assumed that Iraq's oil revenues could pay the bill.

With this group, there is no amount of arrogance and wrongheadedness and incompetence that doesn't go unrewarded.

Which brings us to John Bolton. side from his bona tides with the Project for the New American Century, Bolton was a senior vice president at the American Enterprise Institute before Bush plucked him for duty.

He served "as a senior member of George Bush's legal team in Florida after the 2000 election," as Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service notes. And Bolton was an aide to Jesse Helms, who heaped praise on him: "John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon."

As undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, Bolton was known as Colin Powell's "minder" at the State Department, the neocon mole who reported back to Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz if Powell was straying too far from their agenda.

And he tried to impose this agenda even when it ran opposite of Powell's. While Powell was trying to calm relations with North Korea, Bolton called Kim Jong Il a "tyrannical dictator," which didn't help matters any, even though true.

Bolton also played to the far right crowd in Florida when in May 2002, apropos of nothing, he said Castro had "at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort" and had "provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states." Days later, Powell himself backed off Bolton's remarks, and Jimmy Carter repudiated them.

Bolton is not only undiplomatic. He is also disdainful of international law and institutions. Lobe notes that Bolton himself signed the formal notification to Kofi Annan that the U.S. was pulling out of the Internation-Criminal Court. Bolton told The Wall Street Journal that it was "the happiest moment of my government service."

Bolton is particularly ill equipped to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations because he's on record as saying "there's no such thing as the United Nations" and that "it wouldn't make a bit of difference" if the U.N. building "lost 10 stories."

Writing in The Weekly Standard on October 4, 1999, he denounced what he called "Kofi Annan's U.N. Power Grab." And he said that President Clinton, in defending NATO's intervention in the Balkans, should have rejected Annan's claim that the United States should have come to the Security Council.

"The correct American response, for those who supported the NATO campaign, is: 'We did not need the Security Council's permission to act.'" That's familiar language. In fact, it's the Bush Administration's mantra.

Bolton's hawkishness knows no bounds. One month before the Iraq War, Bolton told Ha'aretz newspaper in Israel that once Saddam falls, "it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran, and North Korea."

Conservatives are beside themselves with joy. "He's been our man at the State Department," David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, told The New York Times.

Frank Gaffney, another Project for the New American Century alum, hailed the nomination for National Review online in an article entitled "A Bolt of Good Sense: John Bolton is the right man for the U.N."

He certainly is the right's man.

Then there is Khalilzad. During the second half of the 1990s, he was on Unocal's payroll. "As an adviser for Unocal, Khalilzad drew up a risk analysis of a proposed gas pipeline from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean," noted corpwatch.org. "He participated in talks between the oil company and Taliban officials in 1997, which were aimed at implementing a 1995 agreement to build the pipeline across western Afghanistan."

Back then, he wanted the U.S. to go easy on the Taliban. "The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran," he wrote embarrassingly in an op-ed for The Washington Post. He added that the U.S. should "reengage" with the Taliban and offer "recognition and humanitarian assistance" to the regime.

He later changed his views and became a harsh critic of the Taliban. But his dream of bringing oil through Afghanistan to port may remain vivid.

Speaking at--where else?--the American Enterprise Institute on March 8, he talked about recreating "the historic Afghan land bridge that will establish a single economic zone composed of Central Asia, South Asia, and Southwest Asia." Such a land bridge could be crucial for oil to get to Western markets.

Khalilzad also blessed the decision by Hamid Karzai to appoint the notorious warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum to be chief of staff for military affairs.

In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet client state, Dostum's troops marauded through Kabul, raping and pillaging as they went.

Allied with the U.S. during the Afghan War, Dostum's troops were responsible for the suffocation of hundreds of Taliban detainees inside shipping containers.

At the American Enterprise Institute event, Khalilzad was asked about Dostum's appointment, and he responded: "I believe that President Karzai's decision to give a role to General Dostum, as he has to other regional strongmen, is a wise policy."

Two days later, Bush nominated Khalilzad to take John Negroponte's place in Baghdad.

The Bush inner circle contains people who were not alums of the Project for the New American Century, of course, but they earned their spots by sheer loyalty.

Condoleezza Rice, who was one of the most inept National Security Advisers of all time and who was shamefully asleep at the wheel on 9/11, now is Secretary of State.

Alberto Gonzales, who justified torture as Bush's White House counsel, has become the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.

John Negroponte, after presiding as U.S. ambassador in Iraq, now heads U.S. intelligence.

Even Ann Veneman, Bush's Secretary of Agriculture, won a promotion to executive director of UNICEE taking over Carol Bellamy's spot. Veneman, who made her career representing agribusiness companies, has shown scarce interest in children's issues. But that doesn't matter to Bush and Cheney. She's a loyal player, and she's a corporatista, and that's enough.

In Bush's second term, there is no one now among the courtiers to offer up a dissenting opinion, and the lack of such views is what makes this term even more dangerous than Bush's last.

In no small measure, what we are witnessing is the second term of the Cheney Administration. It is Cheney who brought in Rumsfeld and insisted that he stay in office during the torture scandal.

It is Cheney who brought in Wolfowitz, who was Cheney's deputy back in 1992 at the Pentagon, when Wolfowitz drew up the initial blueprint for what has become Bush's policy of unilateralism.

It is Cheney who installed Bolton at the State Department and masterminded his nomination as U.N. ambassador. (Cheney has also found a spot for his son-in-law, Philip Perry. On March 30, Bush nominated Perry to be general counsel of Homeland Security. His credentials: He was a lobbyist for Lockheed Martin, a leading contractor at the department. Perry's wife, Elizabeth Cheney, was appointed in February to be Rice's second-highest diplomat for the Middle East, The New York Times reports.)

In retrospect, one of the pivotal moments of the last six years came after George W. Bush had secured the 2000 nomination and Papa Bush tapped Dick Cheney to find Georgie a Vice President who could run the shop on the day to day. As John Nichols notes in Dick: The Man Who Is President, Cheney looked high and low and then gazed in the mirror and declared himself the fairest of them all.

Cheney believes the President has unlimited authority to wage war. He believes that Bush Senior didn't even need Congress's approval to go to war against Iraq back in 1991. "I firmly believe to this day even if the Congress had voted no we had no option but to proceed," Cheney told The Washington Post on January 20 of this year.

To watch the way Bush and Cheney promote the wrong people is to glimpse the arrogance of power. They don't care what the reaction is to their choices. They believe they can appoint whomever they want. And the more galling, the better. If anyone disapproves, tough.

They dare the Democrats to stop them. They dare the media to squawk. They dare the American people to rise up in revulsion.

But for the most part, neither the Democrats nor the media nor the American people have bestirred themselves.

And until they do, the second Cheney Administration will keep going its unmerry way.