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Jewish World Review August 2, 2005 / 26 Tammuz, 5765 The Bolton travesty ends By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
President Bush's decision to by-pass the Senate and give John
Bolton a recess appointment as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
has, according to the chatter from the media and Democrats,
shattered the delicate sense of comity in the Senate since the deal
on judicial filibusters a few months ago. Never mind that Senate
Democrats were filibustering Bolton, which is not very collegial.
In fact, their opposition to Bolton has been an exercise in
paranoid, trash-talking vacuity. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid,
whose chief parliamentary talent is calling people names, has called
Bolton "abominable, mean, unreasonable and bizarre." What was that
about comity again? There are substantive grounds for liberal
Democrats to oppose the hawkish Bolton, but Democrats are so wary of
getting into a philosophical fight that will air their reflexive
devotion to a corrupt and ineffectual U.N. that they made the Bolton
debate a series of silly sideshows.
At first it was about Bolton's temperament. Democrats portrayed
Bolton as a screamer who couldn't resist demeaning underlings.
Bolton is a hard-nosed negotiator and bureaucratic fighter, but he's
professional to a fault. This attack began to wither away when the
hyped Bolton blowups involved him doing things like putting his
hands on his hips.
Then the cry went up that Bolton distorted intelligence in
public statements. That charge was based on internal disputes — a
healthy thing, since intelligence is almost always uncertain and
debatable — about how to interpret intelligence about Syrian and
Cuban weapons programs. Bolton eventually went with the consensus
view of the intelligence agencies. This might be the first time a
nominee has been opposed for things he didn't say, but at one point
might possibly have thought about saying before he decided not to.
To spice things up, there was the allegation that Bolton chased
a woman through a Moscow hotel in the 1990s, throwing office
supplies at her. Even under minimal scrutiny this allegation began
to vanish. When I asked Bolton critic Sen. Joe Biden whether he
believed the charge, he said that he believed Bolton might have
pushed papers under the woman's hotel-room door. "Should that be
disqualifying for a nominee to be U.N. ambassador?" I asked. He
wouldn't answer.
When there seemed nothing left, Democrats focused on a handful
of cases in which Bolton asked to see the blacked-out names of
Americans caught on overseas intelligence intercepts. Democrats spun
a paranoid theory that Bolton asked for the names in pursuit of a
vendetta against intelligence analysts he didn't bully when he
didn't distort intelligence. National Intelligence Director John
Negroponte certified that no names involved in the intelligence
disputes were in the intercepts. But Democrats still cherished their
little conspiracy theory.
Bolton did mistakenly say on a Senate questionnaire that he
hadn't been interviewed in an investigation during the past five
years. He had forgotten that he was questioned in an internal
inquiry into how the infamous 16 words about Saddam Hussein's
alleged attempt to acquire uranium in Niger made it into Bush's 2003
State of the Union. For Bolton, the interview wasn't memorable
precisely because he had — sorry, folks — nothing to do with the
16 words, another liberal obsession.
The Bolton fight would have been cleaner if Democrats had said
something like, "We're liberals, and we're afraid he'll be too tough
at the U.N." Instead, they created a long-running travesty that has
thankfully come to an end, with Bolton headed to Turtle Bay.
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
