It looks like Senator Joe Biden has sent another letter to Secretary Rice today, circling in on the controversy over Bolton’s truthfulness on his nomination form. Josh Marshall points to a Raw Story piece reproducing a July 28 letter to Rice asking whether Bolton was interviewed by State’s Inspector General. (See yesterday’s post.
At Tuesday’s State Department briefing, reporters again tried to get Spokesperson Sean McCormack to say something new about John Bolton. Here’s what he said: Still looking for an up-and-down vote. Up-or-down vote.
By way of followup to Steve’s post from this morning, Reuters’ Vicki Allen reports: The State Department on Thursday said U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton told Congress the truth when he said he did not testify in the investigation of the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Dad, what did you do during the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism? I was a war-blogger, son.
The nation’s security must wait…at least until September, or so moved Senator Frist on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning. Frist pulled the all-important Defense Authorization bill from the Senate floor in order to pass the NRA’s Gun Liability legislation.
It turns out John Bolton is not the first UN Ambassador nominee to consider a recess appointment: in 1999, President Clinton floated the idea of a recess appointment for Richard Holbrooke, one of his UN Ambassador nominees, but Holbrooke refused.
I’m on the road right now, and I’m grateful to the line-up of fascinating personalities who have agreed to help step in and provide their own thinking on a wide variety of public policy questions, as well as risotto recipes.
In a recent column in the Singapore Business Times (reprinted in antiwar.com), “The Unbearable Lightness of Being ‘Condi,’” I suggested that our secretary of state Condoleeza Rice is kind of a, well, lightweight, especially when you compare her to predecessors like, say, George Marshall, John Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson, and of course, Henry Kissinger.
Good morning, everyone. Joining our cast of bloggers today is Leon Hadar, a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a journalist, a professor, and a gentleman. Leon is the author of the just published Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Since the White House has made noises about wanting a UN Ambassador before the United Nations’ session opens in September, they’ve created a phony pretext for the recess appointment — the time demand — when in actuality they’ve spent the whole summer running out the clock.
