Juvenile Democrats
By Money Politic$
The Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are hitting a new low in their unseemly attacks on UN ambassador nominee John Bolton. Especially Senator Barbara Boxer, who insists on nitpicking Bolton over his personal relations with State Department staff. This is school kid stuff, not for adults supposedly dealing with American foreign policy in the ongoing terror war.
In some sense Joe Biden is even guiltier of juvenile behavior since he knows better and is usually a very serious player. Biden’s “warmonger” description of Bolton has been playing on Iran state radio, I learned last night while co-hosting the John Batchelor Radio Show. A normally serious guy like Biden should know better than to hand our enemies this kind of false ammunition, as though the whole world weren’t watching the Senate hearings. But the whole world is watching. As it should, since American decisions reverberate everywhere. I notice that the much-ballyhooed Senator Obama and the old liberal warhorse Senator Christopher Dodd (who used to defend the Ortega brothers in Nicaragua) have followed the Boxer-Biden line.
What is utterly astonishing is the failure of the Democrats to even discuss the scandal-ridden Kofi Annan regime at the UN. Not just oil-for-food, which is bad enough, but also the sexual misconduct charges, the institutional corruption, and of course the ultimate issue which is the disproportionate power held by totalitarian states under current UN rules. The UN should be run by democracies, not terrorist dictatorships. What is more, so far I haven’t heard any Democrats acknowledge that it was John Bolton as a State Department official who succeeded in overturning the anti-Israel zionism is racism resolution that stood for so many years. Bolton did this. An incredible accomplishment. Where are the Democrats on this issue now as they attempt to derail Bolton’s bid?
Cleaning up and reforming the United Nations is the issue.
Until the UN is successfully reformed, and Kofi is gone, American support for the organization will not be restored. It so happens that John Bolton is exactly the guy who can push reforms across-the-board. For those of us who believe a new UN with new leadership can be a force for good in world affairs, reformer Bolton is exactly the right kind of appointment. As a strong supporter of President Bush’s vision of spreading freedom and democracy worldwide, both for its own sake and to defeat radical Islamist totalitarianism, Bolton would be an ideal UN ambassador. Very much in the mold of the late Pat Moynihan or Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Finally, on the point about questioning intelligence analysts, haven’t the various intelligence investigations proven conclusively that the intelligence community simply cannot be trusted? Groupthink, not hard facts, surfaces and resurfaces in these investigations, most notably in the most recent Silberman-Robb Commission, which tackled the confounding misinformation campaign from “curveball”, the notoriously misleading source (who was not Ahmed Chalabi). If anything, John Bolton, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, and other senior policy types should have asked more, not fewer, questions about intelligence-related declarations.
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