Political fumbling and disputation continues over the nomination of John Bolton as U.N. ambassador. The Wall Street Journal explains that it the opposition is all about policy and political strategy to disarm the President.
So John Bolton's nomination to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations is said to be in trouble, as a couple of Senate Republicans waver amid reports that he has been rude to subordinates. Pardon us for breaking up the mock horror, but someone has to point out that what's going on here isn't "advise and consent" but character assassination.This smear campaign is all the more offensive because it is designed to avoid a genuine policy debate. Mr. Bolton, who has worked as a diplomat in two different Administrations, is being sent by Mr. Bush to lead a reform of the U.N. that desperately needs it if it is going to be effective. His skills helped repeal the U.N.'s "Zionism is racism" resolution in the early 1990s, and more recently he ran the successful and innovative Proliferation Security Initiative that helped put Libya out of the WMD business. But Democrats don't want to debate that record, because they know they'd lose. So they have set about to destroy Mr. Bolton personally instead.
USA Today examines the purported issues of Bolton's temperament and temper. Is he really an exception in Washington? Well, no.
It's not as if John Bolton, President Bush's nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations, is the only boss accused of being abusive in this Type A, stressed-out, intensely ambitious town.President Bill Clinton was known for his "standard morning outbursts," according to political adviser James Carville. "President Clinton is not a morning person," Carville told PBS in an interview for the documentary The Clinton Years. "So we generally had to wake him up to start the day. ... We'd wake him with polling information and things like that. He'd often complain in a graphic way about a lot of different stuff."
Then there's the possibility that Bolton's real offense was not using lethal force.
[Michael] Dobson says one facet of the charges against Bolton that may be building opposition is that his alleged boorish behavior often failed to achieve results. "Part of this story for many people is that Bolton appears to have not been good enough to actually get rid of the people he went after," he says. "If he was a first-rate infighter, they'd be gone. Then people might say that, even if they disagreed with Bolton ideologically, that here's a guy who's tough enough to get the job done."
Inimitable Mark Steyn recognizes what's really going on:
If the Senate poseurs and the media wanted to mount a trenchant critique of Bolton's geopolitical philosophy, that would be reasonable enough. But there's not even a pretense of any of that. Instead, his opponents have seized on one episode -- an intelligence analyst in a critical position with whom Bolton and others were dissatisfied -- and used it to advance the bizarre proposition that every junior official should be beyond reproach, and certainly beyond such aggressive ''body language'' as putting one's hands on hips.Posted by Alan at April 22, 2005 12:31 PMIt's been obvious for three years now that the torpid federal bureaucracies -- the agencies that so comprehensively failed America on 9/11 -- are resistant to meaningful reform... We'll talk reform, we'll pass reform bills, we'll merge and de-merge and re-merge every so often, we'll change three-letter acronyms (INS) to four-letter acronyms (BCIS) just to show how serious we are, and a year or four down the line we may well get real tough and require five-letter acronyms.
But in the end we believe underperforming bureaucrats in key roles should be allowed to go on underperforming until retirement age. And, if you happen to show you're just the teensy-weensiest bit upset with one of them, we'll blow it up into a month of hearings on TV.