Paul Wolfowitz runs not the slightest risk of death by extrajudicial hanging or crucifixion, but I want to call dibs on the search terms “Wolfowitz,” “crucify,” “lynch” and “leftists” now because it’s only a matter of time until defenders of the World Bank president and Iraq war architect start throwing them around.

It may be his romantic and nepotistic relationship with former Bank employee Shaha Ali Riza that officially does him in, but that’s not what will prompt the cries of outrage; our hip, modern conservatives don’t regard extramarital affairs as a deal-breaker these days — hence the front-running status of GOP presidential candidate, cross-dresser and serial adulterer Rudy Giuliani — but it isn’t something they’re comfortable promoting as a positive virtue, at least not yet. Wolfowitz, however, is also under fire in connection with efforts by one of his top aides to squelch climate change and family planning as considerations in World Bank programs and reports, and those are ideological things, and ideological things are the stuff of which martyrs are made.

Another potential rallying point is the Bank’s anti-corruption campaign, of which Wolfowitz is both the chief proponent and the poster child bad example. His supporters will claim that attacks on his credibility as a reformer are the result of entrenched, corrupt interests reacting to his flaming sword, and I’ll lay odds that someone, somewhere, will argue that he’s been set up by Riza and unnamed inimical interests (or maybe named ones, who knows).

Never mind that throughout most of the civilized world, placing the phrases “anti-corruption” and “Bush administration official” within a mile of one another amounts to a guaranteed laugh line: the anti-corruption campaign is, as the kids say, replete with irony. Among the details to emerge about the sweetly remunerative position Wolfowitz created for his honey is that the World Bank official who signed off on it is Robin Cleveland, a former Bush administration official whom Wolfowitz hired at the Bank when she left office hurriedly because of her involvement in the Pentagon-Boeing procurement scandal that cost then-Air Force secretary James Roche his job.

One can almost forgive Wolfowitz for lawyering up and digging in his heels. He comes, after all, from a culture in which disastrous performances are routinely rewarded, as his was: fresh from blowing Iraq to smithereens, he found himself installed at the Bank, controlling tens of billions of dollars in grants and loans and pulling down a hefty $300,000 salary along with an unaudited $150,000 expense allowance, the latter on top of reimbursed expenses such as travel, hotel and dining costs.

Despite the presumably intense efforts of Bob Bennett, his new attorney — who compares Wolfowitz’s travails to those of the Duke lacrosse team — Wolfowitz will be gone from the Bank within a month or so. It’ll be interesting to see who Bush nominates to replace him. I hear John Bolton is looking for work …

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