John Bolton: More Evidence He's an Abysmal Choice for UN Ambassador

Daily Read has this story over at Trailing Edge.

You know, a part of me has always been able to understand why there have been some voices - although usually not intelligent ones, more like the Jesse Helms, the George Bush type voices - speaking up for need of reform at the U.N. True, the U.N. is not perfect.

What always go missing in such discussions, however, is that the U.S. has always been one of the biggest subversive proponents to a better U.N. For example, we push the U.N. into giving us credibility on matters the rest of the world wouldn't like and then ignore them outright - or decline to pay our dues for ages - whenever we see fit. Another great example is how we sneer at U.N. sanctions. Oh, sure, we go to the U.N. and get them to declare some country we don't like at the moment as being in violation of certain agreements and to exert sanctions, but whenever the U.N. attempts to sanction the U.S. for bad behavior, we scream bloody murder. Then, whenever Israel does something egregious and the U.N. is poised to take action to bring them in line, the U.S. always vetoes it.

Lately, of course, there's been the Oil for Food scandal. But while we point fingers at Kofi Annan (strange that those "civil rights lovin' when it comes to judicial appointees GOP seem to have so many issues with leaders of color like Annan and Chavez and Aristide), we completely ignore the fact that the U.S. may have profited wildly from the scandal and engaged in it most willingly. And gosh, who do you think profited more from that? The Bushie supporters or Annan? I know it wasn't the people of Iraq and about the only reason Saddam was in power so long was because of us, first directly by propping Saddam up and then, by alienating the rest of the world in how we took off after him again and again.

So yeah, many of us enjoyed watching Norm Coleman get skewered by George Galloway a few weeks ago while our media tried to pretend not to notice and gave little reference to our complicity.

And all of this just makes the choice of Bolton for the U.N. that much worse. Oh, for sure, Bush is never going to allow a truly good world citizen to have that job. But Bolton spent the last few years making more enemies for us; we don't need him to become so visible.