There are too few great moments in our democracy lately. We are collectively jaded, too prone to spin, and too willing to forgive our Senators and House Members’ sacrifice of principle to curry favor with loyalty-obsessed White House. George Voinovich startled the nation and the world with his eloquent rebuke of John Bolton.
James Wolcott does a great job not only of picking on something that TWN worked up on the anti-U.N. intentions of Bolton supporters but gets right at the key questions about Iran, WMDs, and the impact on America, its allies, and the U.N. More later.
I have been flooded by people’s emails today asking “what next on John Bolton?” The news has been focused on the Newsweek retraction, on the “nuclear option” in the Senate regarding judicial confirmations, and the battle today between British Parliament Member George Galloway and Norm Coleman over the wrong-headedness of U.S. foreign policy.
Media….wake up. The White House, Richard Lugar and others were confident that John Bolton would be affirmatively voted on by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.
Bruce Ackerman has just published a powerful piece in today’s Financial Times and TWN has secured permission to reprint the piece in full.
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I’m in Denver for the weekend — out here for a conference on U.S.-China-Taiwan Relations organized by the Center for China-U.S. Cooperation and the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
We know the answer, and so does Paul Light: Blind Loyalty. However, Light’s article today in Newsday posits some very interesting questions about what the personnel appointment/screening process does and does not do when on automatic pilot.
This morning’s Providence Journal has an excellent political column looking forward to the next Senate race in Rhode Island and assessing the impact of Lincoln Chafee’s decision not to stand by John Bolton — but rather to stand by Bush’s decision — on John Bolton. Here is an excerpt from the piece by M.
Finally, some honesty from Bolton supporters is making its way out of the muck. Whereas much of the support for Bolton has had the veneer of being about United Nations reform, what Bolton proponents really want is a ferocious show-down with Iran and North Korea through the United Nations — not because the U.N.
Newsweek‘s Michael Hirsh and Eve Conant have reported another aspect of John Bolton’s delinquency during his last job. Virtually all players in the current review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty blame Bolton for not preparing the U.S. position.