“The person that he has selected to nominate to the position of Ambassador to the United Nations is someone that shares the President’s strong commitment to making sure that multilateral organizations are effective.” — Scott McClellan, 3/7/05

“If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” — John Bolton, President Bush’s nominee to the UN, 1994

[President Bush today named neoconservative, unilateralist hawk John Bolton as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Just who is John Bolton? ]

“We’re going ahead. If you want to come along, come along. We hope you will. But be advised, we’re going ahead on our own…I believe that approach is most likely to produce a larger coalition, because I think, quite frankly, a lot of the members of the old coalition are looking for that kind of American leadership. And a firm and decisive stand by the United States, paradoxical though it may sound, will actually induce more countries to come along.” – John Bolton, NPR, 1/29/98

[President Bush today named neoconservative, unilateralist hawk John Bolton as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Just who is John Bolton? ]

John Bolton on Working Towards Common Goals for Mankind:

“I believe…our foreign policy should support American interests. Let the rest of the world support the rest of the world’s interests.” [The O'Reilly Factor, 3/24/99]

[President Bush today named neoconservative, unilateralist hawk John Bolton as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Just who is John Bolton? ]

“I just wanted to say a quick word on behalf of America’s corporate giants…they have contributed enormously over the years to our defense and to the triumph over communism, and they made a buck off of it as well. I don’t see anything wrong with that. I think it’s another triumph of both the capitalists and democratic sides of our system.” — John Bolton, NPR, 5/21/99

[President Bush today named neoconservative, unilateralist hawk John Bolton as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Just who is John Bolton? ]

Jesse Helms must be proud of President Bush today. A few years ago, Helms called John Bolton “the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at the gates of Armageddon,” and given that Helms and Bolton share similar feelings for the U.N., he must be sorry to miss the chance to confirm Bolston to his new post.

While there are a wealth of quotes and articles about Bolton, his words speak best for themselves:

“If I were doing the Security Council today, I’d have one permanent member because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world… [and that member would be] the United States.” [NPR, Talk of the Nation, 6/6/00]

When proponents of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty worried that its defeat was marking an isolationist turn for the U.S., Bolton said that “such fears are indications of a profoundly misguided and potentially dangerous philosophy in American foreign policy” and called them “timid and neo-pacifist.” [Taipei Times, 11/20/99]

And when he was given permission to sign the letter to the U.N. that stated Washington was renouncing the Rome Treaty creating the International Criminal Court, he described it as “the happiest moment of my government service.” [USA Today, 1/18/00]

[President Bush today named neoconservative, unilateralist hawk John Bolton as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Just who is John Bolton? ]

Bolton has harshly disparaged the United Nations in the past. In 1994, for example, he charged, “There’s no such thing as the United Nations,” saying that ”If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” Four years later, he attacked the international body again, saying, “many Republicans in Congress — and perhaps a majority — not only do not care about losing the General Assembly vote but actually see it as a ‘make my day’ outcome. Indeed, once the vote is lost, and the adverse consequences predicted by the U.N.’s supporters begin to occur, this will simply provide further evidence to many why nothing more should be paid to the U.N. system.”

In the prestigious vein of famous sayings like, “you go to war with the army you have,” Pentagon officials offered the New York Times various excuses for what the paper found to be the Army’s astounding incompetence at arming our troops in Iraq. These include pearls of wisdom like, “While we would all like to be faster and more responsive, it was fairly responsive.” Even that appears to be giving the Pentagon too much credit. Here are a few of the highlights from the Times story:

– The Pentagon gave a contract for thousands of the ceramic plate inserts that make combat vests bulletproof to a former Army researcher who had never mass-produced anything. “He struggled for a year, then gave up entirely.”

– In shipping plates from other companies, the Army’s equipment manager “effectively reduced the armor’s priority to the status of socks….Some 10,000 plates were lost along the way, and the rest arrived late.”

– Going into the war, the Pentagon decided against asking Detroit automakers like General Motors to start making armored Humvees because they would need too much time to set up new assembly lines. But the Pentagon originally under-ordered from its sole contractor, O’Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt, and the company is not expected to reach the Army’s current 550 per month demand for the vehicles until this spring.

Kind of sounds less like a “matter of physics” — Rumsfeld’s explanation — than a matter of competence. The results: During a time when the insurgency was growing and casualties were mounting, the Defense Department took 167 days “just to start getting bulletproof vests to soldiers in Iraq” after Gen. Richard Cody, who led the Army Strategic Planning Board, placed the order.

[President Bush today named neoconservative, unilateralist hawk John Bolton as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Just who is John Bolton? ]

For a diplomat, Bolton has a disturbing lack of tact and diplomacy. In 1999, he roiled the diplomatic waters by charging that a sound U.S. policy “would start by making it clear to the North that we are indifferent to whether we ever have ‘normal’ diplomatic relations with it, and that achieving that goal is entirely in their interests, not ours. We should also make clear that diplomatic normalization with the U.S. is only going to come when North Korea becomes a normal country.” In July 2003, just before crucial six-nation talks with North Korea, his thoughtless comments caused a heightening of tensions. Bolton called North Korean leader Kim Jong Il a “tyrannical dictator” of a country where “life is a hellish nightmare.” North Korea immediately responded, saying that “such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks…. We have decided not to consider him as an official of the U.S. administration any longer nor to deal with [him].” The State Department was forced to call Bolton home and send a replacement to the talks. Bolton’s colleagues are scathing in their assessment of his diplomatic skills: One high-level co-worker called Bolton “an anti-diplomat who tries to intimidate those who disagree with his views.”

One of Montana’s top political reporters, Chuck Johnson, has a great piece about how the state’s two U.S. senators are way too close to corporate lobbyists. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) is now fully embroiled in the Jack Abramoff scandal, after Abramoff helped steer money to his Political Action Committee in return for a $3 million grant for one of Abramoff’s clients. In all, Abramoff provided Burns with 42 percent of his entire PAC funds – no small amount.

Meanwhile, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) in January “gathered 50 lobbyists at the Teatro Restaurant in Washington” to demand each of them raise him $100,000 for his 2008 campaign. CNN quoted two lobbyists, without naming them, who said “they’ve never gotten such an aggressive pitch from a senator.” This is the same Baucus who was part of the famous $11 million picture during the Medicare debate.

Johnson has an idea for our two senators: they should:

…trade in their dark blue, pinstriped suits for [s]ome brightly colored NASCAR-style jackets and pants, with patches displaying logos of their sponsors. Burns could sport patches with the logos of AT&T, whose political action committee and officials ponied up $49,000 in his 2000 race, followed by Lockheed Martin ($39,730), BellSouth Corp. ($36,300) and SBC Communications ($36,250). Baucus could wear the logo patches of American International Group, whose PAC and officials coughed up $36,250 in his 2002 race, followed by Microsoft ($26,250), General Electric ($26,000) and Goldman Sachs ($25,000).

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