Bush appoints yet another incompetent ideologue

Despite the country's overwhelming tilt to the left in the mid-term elections, President Bush has decided to continue his bad habit of filling key posts with extreme ideologues and incompetents. The person he has chosen to head family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services is a doctor named Eric Keroack, who is affiliated with a group vehemently opposed to birth control and is infamous for his wacky theories about reproductive health.

Among Keroack's "credentials":

• He served as the medical director of A Woman’s Concern, a network of pregnancy counseling clinics that tries to dissuade women from having an abortion by telling them that abortions steeply increase the risk of breast cancer. The group also refuses to dispense contraception - even to married women. Its Web site says that contraceptive drugs and devices are “demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness.”

• In speeches and in written works, Dr. Keroack has said that sex with multiple partners alters brain chemistry in a way that makes it harder for women to form bonding relationships. One of the researchers he cited to support that claim says it's “complete pseudoscience,” unsupported by her findings.

This is the man who is going to lead the federal office that finances birth control, pregnancy tests, breast cancer screening, and other critical health care services for five million poor people a year, and to advise Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt on family planning issues?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.