Withdraw or be pushed out by the White House. Survive the test of his professional life. Suffer a rejection by the Senate. That's about what it comes down to for John R. Bolton, President Bush's besieged nominee to be U.N. ambassador.
"This nomination is not doomed, but it's on life support and the plug may well be pulled any day," said Allan J. Lichtman, a political history professor at American University.
"My sense is that he's going down," said Thomas Mann, an expert on Congress and the presidency at the Brookings Institution in Washington. It is not clear, Mann said, whether Bolton would jump or be pushed by the White House.
Who cares? As long as gravity and that sudden stop at the bottom do their stuff!
The Brits are grinding their ax as well. From Newsweek.
But the London story is further evidence that Bolton and the White House have their work cut out for them. On several occasions, America's closest ally in the war on terror, Britain, was irked by what U.S. and British sources say were efforts by Bolton to undermine promising diplomatic openings. Perhaps the most dramatic instance took place early in the U.S.-British talks in 2003 to force Libya to surrender its nuclear program, NEWSWEEK has learned. The Libya deal succeeded only after British officials "at the highest level" persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team. A crucial issue, according to sources involved in the affair, was Muammar Kaddafi's demand that if Libya abandoned its WMD program, the U.S. in turn would drop its goal of regime change. But Bolton was unwilling to support this compromise. The White House agreed to keep Bolton "out of the loop," as one source puts it. A deal was struck only after Kaddafi was reassured that Bush would settle for "policy change"-surrendering his WMD. One Bush official called the accounts of both incidents "flatly untrue" (like, duh! - ed.).
It ain't in the bag yet either way. I'm hopin' Bolton will go down. That cat wouldn't have lasted ten minutes in any of the motorcycle shops I've worked in with a mouth like his, and most of the hairy bastards that populate 'sickle shops would make better ambassadors. And, Bolton: take that little chimp down with ya.
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