If you should happen to telephone Ambassador John Bolton's office at the United Nations, chances are good the person who answers your call will be one Peggy Kerry. Does that name ring a bell? Perhaps it should.

According to a July 27, 2004 article in the Washington Times, Miss Kerry was the featured speaker at an event sponsored by the NOW in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention. "And he has a secret weapon," Kerry boasted. "It seems to me that it's up to the women, because when women vote, Democrats win."

And which "he" was Miss Peggy talking about? Why, brother John, of course. Senator John Kerry, Democratic candidate for president of the United States.

I'm certain that Miss Kerry is well-qualified to work as a press aide. But really, how can the State Department be so clueless as to allow an avowed political and ideological foe of President Bush to hold such a sensitive position? Why not assign her to an understaffed consulate in, say, Mozambique?

Tuesday night, President Bush's Republican party hemorrhaged blood all over the TV screen. The Dems took control of the House of Representatives and registered solid gains in the Senate. But the electoral losses certainly weren't for Bush failing to appease the rad-fems.

Under the Clinton two-for-the-price-of-one presidency, a bevy of feminist-inspired programs sprang up throughout the federal bureaucracy. A decade later, most of those programs are going stronger than ever, sucking up taxpayer money, violating men's civil rights, and destroying families.

Remember Title IX, the well-meaning program that Clinton appointee Norma Cantu turned into a rigid quota system that shut down hundreds of men's sports teams? Just because Cantu was shown the door doesn't mean the buzz-saw was turned off.

Recently James Madison University in Virginia, which has a student body that is 61% female, announced its decision to cut 10 sports teams, including wrestling, swimming, cross-country, indoor and outdoor track, archery, and gymnastics. Why? Even though 51% of all JMU student-athletes are female, that wasn't enough to satisfy the bean-counters at the Department of Education.

Taxpayer-funded abortions is another feminist priority. Last year Bush Administration employees had a field day awarding $265 million in grants and contracts to Planned Parenthood. That tidy sum allowed the group to perform nearly 250,000 abortions. And with its spare change, Planned Parenthood filed lawsuits against bans on partial birth abortions.

And then there were the bureaucrats at the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) who didn't like the idea of divorced fathers seeing their kids. So in direct violation of federal ethics rules, they took it upon themselves to tell the North Dakota legislators to defeat a shared parenting initiative.

Their reasoning? It's better to let fatherless kids become drop-outs and juvenile delinquents - that way the state can rake in millions of federal welfare money.

Shame on ACF head Margo Bean for tolerating these bureaucratic shenanigans.

To his credit, President Bush did manage to shoehorn $150 million into last year's welfare reform law to promote marriage and fatherhood. But that money will do little to stem the destructive effects of Clinton time-bomb programs like the Violence Against Women Act.

In most states, domestic violence is defined so broadly that sending mental telepathic messages is now considered be a form of harassment and worthy of state intervention - remember the David Letterman case?

These laws allow any half-witted welfare queen to game the system. All she has to do is utter this phrase: "Judge, I'm feeling afraid for my safety." No proof of injury or physical violence is needed.

Presto! Those 7 words will get her man kicked out of the house and excuse her from return-to-work welfare requirements. Don't worry that the kids have now been deprived of their daddies, the state will be there to provide.

All this puts the Department of Justice feminists in high spirits, because with the stroke of a judge's pen, another family has been dissolved, a patriarch has been de-throned, and the statistics of "abused" women continue to mount.

Of course, there's an obvious solution to this travesty - remove the perverse incentives to lie. But then the N.O.W. lobby might accuse you of being "anti-woman."

One of these days, the G.O.P. will come to its senses and realize that you can never appease the Gender Guerillas. Kow-towing to the rad-fem agenda is a losing political strategy. Mr. President, it's time to do some housecleaning.


Carey Roberts has been published frequently in the Washington Times, Townhall.com, LewRockwell.com, ifeminists.net, Intellectual Conservative, and elsewhere. He is a staff reporter for the New Media Alliance.