Because of his limited experience with international affairs (not unusual for a former governor), it was a huge relief that Bush's first four meetings with foreign leaders -- Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Mexican President Vicente Fox, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Colombian President Andrés Pastrana -- seemed to go smoothly. But the articulateness and easy, natural authority of Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice already threaten to cast their boss in the shade.

When Rice, with her deft mind and fierce hawk's eyes, briefly stepped before the microphones at Fox's ranch in Cristobal, Mexico, two weeks ago, the usual chorus broke out in my house: "That woman should be president!" It's no coincidence that Rice is a football fan who says her dream job is commissioner of the National Football League. She has seen the direct, dynamic line between military history and football strategy. (So often assailed by feminists, football, I've argued, is a complex analytic system that makes poststructuralism look like lumpy French porridge.) The first viable female candidate for president, whatever her party, must demonstrate deep military knowledge to win the confidence of the electorate. It's courses in military history, not women's studies, that ambitious young women urgently need in college.

Donald Rumsfeld certainly made a dreadful debut as secretary of defense by his crass mishandling of the initial government response to the Feb. 9 collision of the nuclear submarine USS Greeneville with the Japanese fishing trawler Ehime Maru, which sank off Hawaii with the loss of nine lives. Rumsfeld's arrogant posturing, absent the facts, made a bad situation much worse. That civilian tourists, even before the lax Clinton administration, have routinely milled about in the control rooms of military ships on maneuver came as a shock to most Americans. Anyone concerned about the rehabilitation of the morale and prestige of the U.S. military had to be sickened by this tragedy, which appears at this point to have been caused by the stupidity and vanity of the Greeneville's commander.

Speaking of stupidity, how 'bout them New York voters? They sure got themselves a plug nickle when they swept Flora Flimflam -- er, I mean Hillary Rodham Clinton -- into office. How could anyone be surprised at Sen. Hillary's mendacity and venality when those traits were perfectly obvious during most of her tenure as first lady? The shameless Democrat partisans in the major media (notably at the New York Times) need their consciences hosed down for their silence when carpetbagger Hillary was forced down the throats of New York state Democrats, who were fascistically denied an open primary where they could have supported the smart, savvy, experienced Rep. Nita Lowey.

As an early admirer of the Clintons who was shocked awake by the 1993 healthcare fiasco and other scandals (see the transcripts of two 1994 CNN "Crossfire" shows, reprinted in "Vamps & Tramps," where I defended Clinton accuser Paula Jones and argued that Hillary "hides from accountability"), I strongly feel that Hillary has always benefited from a weird residual sexism. Special treatment is still protectively accorded middle-aged heterosexual women by supposedly egalitarian journalists whose brains go soft when Hillary, who's as butch as they come, turns on her pink estrogen light. It's the manipulative tyranny of the mother imago.

But Hillary has already paid a high price for her willful blurring of the ethical borderline. Her maiden Senate speech two weeks ago, which had been glowingly projected by starry-eyed telejournalists last fall as sure to draw worldwide attention as her first step toward the presidency, was sparsely attended and largely ignored by both the press and her fellow senators because of boiling controversies over pardons, furniture and flatware after the Clintons' chaotic decampment from public housing.

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