In the current rising ugly of GOP politics, an old, villainous favorite has again been sucked to the surface, alighted by Jeb! onto the stage (via the Wall Street Journal):

‘“Paul Wolfowitz is providing some advice,” he said of the deputy defense secretary during President George W. Bush’s administration.
“This parlor game that’s played where you have 25, 30 or 40 people who are helping you with foreign policy—if they have any executive experience, they’ve had to deal with two Republican administrations. Who were the people who were the last two Republican presidents? I mean, this is kind of a tough game for me to be playing, to be honest with you.”‘

‘Wolfman‘ tickling the Jeb! fancy — not!

(Illustration: ‘Paul Wolfowitz,’ by David Levine, found here).

Gross, but not the worse.
Last February, Jeb! named his foreign policy team (well before he officially entered the race), and Wolfowitz was among the mostly former nit-twits from George W’s administration, and today Jeb! again blubbered out the above nonsense during a grip-n-grin at the Iowa State Fair.
‘Wolfman‘ is a piece of work. A good background piece by David Corn at Mother Jones from last May, Wolfowitz as pure nuts and consistently wrong: ‘He discounted the possibility of sectarian violence in Iraq following the invasion, insisted that Iraq’s oil revenues would finance post-war reconstruction, and declared that he was “reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators.”‘

‘Wolfman‘s Iraqi war crimes were apparently just a run-up to George W naming him head of the World Bank, where he continued waging being a wrong-headed asshole — from Salon, in April 2007:

Wolfowitz’s World Bank scandal over his girlfriend reveals many of the same qualities that created the wreckage he left in his wake in Iraq: grandiosity, cronyism, self-dealing and lying — followed by an energetic campaign to deflect accountability.
As with the war, he has retreated behind his fervent profession of good intentions to excuse himself.
The ginning up of the conservative propaganda mill that once disseminated Wolfowitz’s disinformation on WMD to defend him as the innocent victim of a political smear only underlines his tried-and-true methods of operation.
The hollowness of his defense echoes in the thunderous absurdity of Monday’s Wall Street Journal editorial: “Paul Wolfowitz, meet the Duke lacrosse team.”
Superficially, Wolfowitz’s arrangement for his girlfriend of a job with a hefty increase in pay in violation of the ethics clauses of his contract and without informing the World Bank board might seem like an all-too-familiar story of a man seeking special favors for a romantic partner.
Wolfowitz has tried to cast the scandal as a “painful personal dilemma,” as he described it in an April 12 e-mail to outraged employees of the World Bank, who have taken to calling the neoconservative’s girlfriend his “neoconcubine.”
He was, he says, just attempting to “navigate in uncharted waters.”
But the fall of Wolfowitz is the final act of a long drama — and love or even self-love may not be the whole subject.

And smirk at being an asshole — from the Guardian in May 2007;

Mr Wolfowitz still enjoys support from the Bush administration, where he served as deputy defence secretary at the Pentagon during the invasion of Iraq.
Yesterday vice president Dick Cheney defended Mr Wolfowitz, saying: “Paul is one of the most able public servants I’ve ever known …. I think he’s a very good president of the World Bank, and I hope he will be able to continue.”
The US treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, was yesterday said to also be drumming up support for Mr Wolfowitz, while European governments increasingly despair of US intransigence in allowing Mr Wolfowitz to hang on.
The angry comments attributed to Mr Wolfowitz came from damning testimony by Xavier Coll, head of human resources at the bank, who provided investigators with his notes of a meeting with Mr Wolfowitz last year.
The notes directly contradict Mr Wolfowitz’s assertions that the details of Ms Riza’s treatment were properly shared with senior bank officials.
…
In March last year, when a mention of Ms Riza’s secondment outside the bank to avoid rules about partners was first published in the magazine US News & World Report, an angry Mr Wolfowitz accused Mr Coll of leaking the information.
According to Mr Coll’s notes: “At the end of the conversation Mr Wolfowitz became increasingly agitated and said that he was ‘tired of people … attacking him’ and ‘you should get your friends to stop it’.
Mr Wolfowitz said, ‘If they fuck me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them too’,” naming several senior bank staff he felt were vulnerable.

‘Wolfman‘ eventually resigned from the Bank, where at the end, he was “…treated like a leper,” and couldn’t be trusted.

In pure, useless lunacy, ‘Wolfman‘ will join with another George W alumni, Scooter Libby, this fall to become instructors in foreign policy (via The Hill in June): ‘The course, titled “The War in Iraq: A Study in Decision-Making”, will examine some “key strategic decisions” during the war, according to a description by the Hertog Foundation in D.C., which will offer the week-long course.’

Howling ‘Wolfman‘ crazy…Jeb! smiling along W.