For secretary of education, the president had selected a Buddhist monk who shaved his head and dressed in a saffron robe and sandals. For secretary of agriculture, he asked for a shepherd from Nevada who lived alone in the hills and spoke broken English. The man’s only known “credential” was that he had once played jai alai in Las Vegas. For secretary of energy, he named a Lebanese Shiite Muslim who was a member of the terrorist group, Hezbollah, and ran a filling station in Dearborn, Michigan.

For drug czar, he picked a man who had spent his life crusading for the legalization of all narcotics. For secretary of state, a professor of Eastern religions from Harvard University who had close ties to Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Japanese cult of Shiva worshipers known as Aum Shinri Kyo, or Supreme Truth. They had been linked with a poisonous gas attack in a Tokyo subway in 1995. And he chose for attorney general a militant black feminist attorney who advocated abolishing the death penalty and closing all prisons.

It was as if the new president was deliberately attempting to ridicule the agencies of the United States government in order to create sentiment for their destruction.

In contrast with the changes in the administration implied by the president’s strange nominations, his request that Al Augustus be reconfirmed as secretary of defense and that James Wong remain as secretary of the treasury seemed odd only because they were so logical and appropriate. But perhaps most surprising was that his new appointments were totally out of character with his previous persona. All except the man he selected to control the nation’s money supply. For the post of chairman of the Federal Reserve board, he nominated the brilliant international banker, financier, and philanthropist, Tauriq Haddad.

By the time the nominations hit the floor of the United States Senate, that famed deliberative body more closely resembled a ward for the criminally insane. The presiding officer on that day was a junior senator from Massachusetts, who sat on the dais talking to himself and slapping an invisible being that was leaving wet teeth marks on his hands.

The majority leader was banging his hand on his desk, yelling, “Stop it! Stop it!” while the minority leader was pacing up and down the aisle, jerking his head violently from side to side, his hands shaking as if from palsy. Other members were slapping and rubbing parts of their bodies as if they were being bitten by invisible beings. While all this was going on, other members either calmly sat at their desks in the Senate chamber watching in bewilderment or fled to the safety of their offices.