Maureen Dowd on the evil Dr. K!

He's Ba-a-ack! Only someone as pathologically opaque as the vice president could appreciate the sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone intent on recreating the glory days of the Ford and Nixon White Houses could have hungered to add the 79-year-old Dr. Strange?? I mean, Dr. Kissinger to the Bush team.

There will be naysayers who quibble that the president's choice to lead the 9/11 commission is not so much a realist as an opportunist, not so much Metternich as Machiavelli.

They will look askance at Mr. Kissinger's resume: keeping the Vietnam War going for years after he realized it might be unwinnable; encouraging the illegal bombing of Cambodia; backing Chile's murderous Pinochet; playing Iago to President Richard Nixon, telling him he'd be "a weakling" if he did not prosecute newspapers running the Pentagon Papers; wiretapping journalists and his own colleagues to track down leaks on the Cambodia bombing.

If you look for the words "Kissinger" and "secret" in the same sentence in Nexis, the search cannot be completed; there are too many results. When he was dating Jill St. John and Liv Ullmann and preaching that power is an aphrodisiac, he even coyly called himself "a secret swinger."

In Walter Isaacson's biography, "Kissinger," the same words cascade: "deceitful," "disingenuous," "paranoid," "insecure," "temper tantrum," "flatterer," "two-faced" and "secretive." The uber-diplomat has even been criticized for dissembling in his own memoirs. But secretiveness is not a disqualification for jobs in this White House. Quite the contrary: only the clandestine and the conspiratorial need apply.