It’s a time-honored strategy of the subordinate — in particular, children. When you’re not allowed to make the rules, nagging at the authority has a lengthy history of wearing down resistance and proudly earning the authority’s sincere admission that “Fine. I don’t care any more. Do whatever you want. Just stop bothering me.”

And that seems to be the level of national political discourse at the moment. Republicans recognize they hold all the cards in Washington and have indicated they’ll be more than willing to bend rules and principles to get things done efficiently. Nowhere is this more evident than in a long-standing GOP threat to disallow filibusters in discussions of judicial nominees — and there’s a long list of other examples that we won’t get bogged down with here.

Republicans have the votes. President Bush has the mandate, the political capital, and he is going to spend it. Democrats are left in many circumstances to snivel and whine about everything Bush tries, knowing full well that making noise is about the extent of what they can do right now.

Nagging and whining are generally thought of as unbecoming. But when the powers that be aren’t interested in considering other views, those tactics have the virtue of being effective, for the plaintive child as well as the minority party.

Bush has nominated Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary responsible for many of the plans and inaccurate predictions for the war in Iraq, to run the World Bank, the organization with a stated mission “to fight poverty and improve the living standards of people in the developing world.”

Now, this nomination doesn’t come down to a Republican-Democratic vote tally, and it’s too often anyway that these nominees are judged on their affiliation rather than their merits.

But Wolfowitz is a bad pick for this post, for reasons enumerated repeatedly last week, the most important being his lack of credibility because of an absurd 2003 assertion that the reconstruction of Iraq would pay for itself through oil revenues. And he’s the latest horrible, divisive choice by Bush for administrative posts that could use an effective if boring personality rather than a polarizing figure who becomes more the story than his or her job. Like Alberto Gonzales, whom you know as “the torture guy,” not “the attorney general” and John Bolton, whom you know as “the guy who hates the United Nations,” not “the U.N. ambassador.”

So we dispiritedly add our voice to the outcry against Wolfowitz and the World Bank. We would rather be called a “broken record” for registering our concerns than play nice and stand by as Bush misuses his mandate to bring the spoils system to new levels.