THE STUNNING IRONIES in the Bush cabinet continue to abound: a secretary of energy who has called for the elimination of that very department, an EPA Administrator who is governor of the most polluted state in her region, a secretary of health and human services who led the charge in dismantling the welfare system, and an education secretary whose doctoral thesis was on how to react quickly when the ball is snapped in a football game. The hypocrisies here are ultimately not as comical as they are offensive, and they point to a deeper paradox: The Left has painted itself into a corner with its unrelenting focus on racial and gender diversity over bread-and-butter progressive policies, so that we now have the most diverse -- and also the most right wing -- administration in history. It thus makes the irony even deeper that the latest round of "nannygate" has crossed party lines, coming back to haunt one of the would-be cabinet's most conservative women nominees.

Linda Chavez is just the latest in a string of female appointees who have been shot down over domestic hiring issues. Eight years ago, of course, Clinton nominated Zoe Baird for attorney general; then there was Kimba Wood, the almost-nominee, who followed closely behind. Now, we have Chavez falling on the proverbial political knife for allegedly hiring an illegal housekeeper. And herein lies the issue: It is only the female politicos that get in trouble over domestic hiring issues -- never men. The reason for this seems clear enough: a tacit understanding that a woman's place is still in the home, even and especially when she ventures outside of it.

Conservative social commentator David Frum has written that "every woman lawyer, accountant, college professor, and business executive owes her emancipation from housework to the women who made feminism possible. No, not Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. The women on whom feminism rests are immigrants from Oaxaca and Luzon, from Guatemala and Senegal: the nannies and housecleaners who watch the kids, scrub the floors, and do the cooking so that educated American women can become lawyers, accountants, professors, and executives." Sanctimonious chauvinism and sweeping historical generalizations aside, Frum's thesis neatly skirts the obvious question: To whom do the male executives (including himself) owe their emancipation? We might also ask the male Bush nominees: Who cleans and caretakes for you and yours? Several of the Bush selections have high-powered career wives (and children); how vigorously is the FBI checking the child-care and house-cleaning arrangements of, say, John Ashcroft, whose spouse was a professor of business law at Howard University? Did Mr. Ashcroft pay the proper social security taxes for whomever helped out in their home? Or was that the little woman's responsibility?

In fact, in the wake of the Baird/Wood nomination debacles, the late-secretary of commerce, Ron Brown, made a public revelation that he had not properly paid the social security taxes of someone who had worked in his home. He was allowed to remit the back taxes and appropriate interest/penalties and kept his political career on track. (But who knows? Had he been white and male, maybe the issue wouldn't have come up at all.) At the time, presidential spokesperson Dee Dee Myers was asked whether Clinton planned to vet all senior White House staff and Cabinet officials on this issue. Her answer was no. Apparently, Bush has not made any plans to specifically look into this issue with Ashcroft or any of his other male nominees in order to clear the air and relieve our anxieties. But then, why would he? The most pernicious forms of institutional sexism are often the most invisible: They are not the cases in which women are treated unfairly (at least, not directly) but the instances in which (white) men are not held accountable to the laws and standards that are supposed to be applied to everyone -- when they get away with something they shouldn't get away with. Of course, this is something the "young and irresponsible" George W. knows all about.