Kittens’ karma: Republican Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee was appointed to Majority Leader of the Senate by White House political director Karl Rove in 2003, after Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi made a racist remark.

The appointment of Frist (who was, of course, “elected” by a majority of Republican senators who knew that defying Rove would be political suicide) was a move to put a reliable White House stooge in charge of the Senate.

Now Frist’s leadership is going down in flames, but, so far, hardly anyone is connecting the dots between Frist’s incompetence and the Bush’s “Boy Genius” who engineered his accession:

Frist, once esteemed as a citizen-politician, a heart- and lung-transplant surgeon who spent part of each year donating his services in the most desperate parts of Africa, has transformed himself into the ultimate political opportunist. His moves—like last week’s ludicrous attempt to hijack the Senate’s immigration debate and move it in a punitive, populist direction—have been so clunky that he has lost the respect of his colleagues, especially Republicans. (The Democrats are thrilled by his ineptitude.) “I hear he was a pretty good surgeon,” a Republican Senator said last week when I asked how Frist had been as majority leader.

Next up, watch the wheels will come off Dr. Frists’s quixotic bid for the presidency:

Frist will leave the Senate at the end of the year and start his presidential campaign. “He’ll disappear,” said a Republican consultant. “He’s not built for heavy weather. He’s just not an instinctive politician. And when you’re a light candidate, every maneuver seems naked and tactical. With Frist, it’s been college Republican sort of stuff.”