Byrd On Bolton
-- Lorie Byrd
PoliPundit.com
This time the Byrd is me, not the loony Senator from West Virginia that is not related to me. (Honest to goodness, he ISN’T). I have not commented on Bolton since the recess appointment and not all that much prior to that – although I enjoyed this post quite a lot.
polipundit.com
After thinking a bit about it, and reading some others’ opinions and listening to those on television, I have decided that I am tickled pink that President Bush made the recess appointment. I was leaning that direction anyway, but what put me firmly in the “tickled pink” group was the amusing interview of Senator Norm Coleman by Chris Matthews on Hardball Monday. Coleman was excellent and Matthews was so embarrassingly silly that he was funny. It used to make me angry when Matthews would make statements like the ones made about Bolton, but now, I find them so obviously ridiculous and silly that it is hard to muster more than a chuckle.
Matthews questioned Coleman about Bolton’s bullying. He is evidently convinced that Bolton is going to be shaking his deadly finger all over the U.N. and he is really worried that Bolton referring to the lunatic leader of North Korea as a tyrannical dictator is going to push the already crazy guy over the edge and make him really mad at us.
Hardball ran a clip of Tom Harkin saying that President Bush was sticking his finger in the eye of Democrats and had showed the least respect for the Senate of any President ever. Okay, that one really put me in the pro-recess appointment camp. Hey, Tommy Harkin, has the Senate ever showed less respect to any President when it comes to confiming nominees than this Senate has to this President? Senate Democrats can dish it out, but they can’t take a little stick to the eye. Jeff Goldstein makes an excellent observation:
Amazing, isn’t it? The activist left base is in such a
feedback loop that they obstruct, and then cite the fruit
of the obstruction as proof of the righeousness for
obstructing in the first place. Without irony!
Cliff May makes another excellent observation that those who claim Bolton does not have the support of the Senate and therefore will not have credibility at the U.N. miss the very important point that the recess appointment shows that Bolton has the complete support of the President . When he speaks to those at the U.N. there should be little doubt of that.
Betsy Newmark’s post on others that have been the recipients of recess appointments is also worth a look. She also speaks the truth about why Gloria Borger’s advice to the Democrats concerning confirmations (in her example, Roberts) won’t work even if Democrats tried it because their idea of what kind of judges should sit on the Supreme Court is not the same as the kind of judges the public would have there. It is necessary to misrepresent the views of conservative judges in order to make them objectionable to the public.
I would argue that something similar might be said about the Bolton appointment. With all the stories in the news of the Oil for Food scandal and the rapes of young girls in Africa by U.N. “peacekeepers", and on and on, do Democrats really think the public is hankering for someone to go to the U.N. and just go with the flow?
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