US: The conflict over the nomination of John Bolton as American ambassador to the United Nations has been portrayed as a partisan battle between Republicans and Democrats who are being cheered on by the so-called liberal media, writes Conor O'Clery
Democrats should "stop playing politics" with the nomination, scolded White House spokesman Scott McClellan. This line of argument is wearing thin, however. It is now more of a struggle between hawks and doves within the Republican Party itself.
On one level it is an extension of the fight between Dick Cheney and Colin Powell over the style and content of American diplomacy. The vice-president is Bolton's patron and is pushing the nomination hard. Both Cheney and the fiercely conservative Bolton share a deep disdain for the UN and want to shake up the world body.
Powell is aghast at the nomination and is now letting that be known. He is the only one of six living former Republican secretaries of state who refused to sign a letter supporting Bolton as ambassador to the UN.
His former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, clearly acting as Powell's surrogate, said Bolton would be an "abysmal ambassador".
Yesterday it emerged that Powell has privately advised two wavering Republican senators, Lincoln Chafee and Chuck Hagel, that Bolton, while smart, is a very problematic government official.
The votes of Chafee, Hagel and a third republican, Senator George Voinovich, will determine whether Bolton's nomination is sent from the Foreign Relations Committee to the full Senate for approval.
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The bad blood between Cheney and Powell goes back to the days of the George Bush snr administration when Cheney was defence secretary and Powell was chief of the general staff. In four years they never spent "a single purely social hour together", Powell wrote in his memoirs.
The mutual dislike continued into current George Bush's first term. Powell regaled journalist Bob Woodward with stories of a "feverish" Cheney seeking to find reasons to attack Iraq. The two could not bear to have lunch together, and never did.
Cheney reportedly pushed for the ousting of Powell after the 2004 election and his replacement by the more compliant Condoleezza Rice.
While John Bolton has been accused of mistreating subordinates and former colleagues, a possibly more seriously claim has been made, that he misled the Senate panel in his testimony two weeks ago. It concerned a contentious speech Bolton delivered in South Korea in July 2003 that complicated efforts to get talks going between the US and North Korea on nuclear proliferation. Bolton accused North Korean leader Kim Jong-il of living "like royalty" in Pyongyang while his people lived in a "hellish nightmare". This is true, but not very diplomatic. Asked by a senator to account for his hardline speech, Bolton said that at the time the US ambassador to South Korea Thomas Hubbard had approved it and indeed had commented: "Thanks a lot for that speech, John. It'll help us a lot out here."
Hubbard, a career diplomat appointed by Bush, told CBS News on Thursday that this was not true. He had specifically, and unsuccessfully, asked Bolton to tone down the speech as unhelpful in dealing with North Korea.
"I told the committee that if you're basing your vote on his [ Bolton's] assertion that I approved his speech, that is not true," Hubbard said.
From the former ambassador's account it seems that the visit was not a bundle of laughs. Bolton slammed down the phone on him when he learned that he would not get a meeting with South Korea's president, and later refused to attend a dinner Hubbard had set up for him with prominent South Koreans, a huge loss of face for Hubbard.
The North Koreans were predictably furious about the speech and called Bolton "rude human scum", "bloodsucker" and a "beastly man bereft of reason" and said they would refuse to talk to any US delegation if he was included.
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Such vituperative language is not unknown in American politics. Time magazine's cover this week was devoted to Ann Coulter, an icon of the conservative right whose books are instant bestsellers. On North Korea she once said it would be "fun to nuke them" as a warning to the world.
She enrages the left and produces whoops of glee on the right. In a column last year she said she ensured she only flew with airlines that discriminated against "swarthy men".
Imagine the great slogans the airlines could use, she said: 'Now Frisking All Arabs - Twice!'
Coulter famously stated after 9/11 about Muslims who cheered the attacks: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
Critics say Coulter coarsens the political culture in America with her strident and incendiary rhetoric. Writer John Cloud portrayed her as less Joe McCarthy and more a right-wing Ali G, a "combination of hard-charging righteousness and willowy, sex-kitten pulchritude."
When USA Today newspaper sent her to write about last year's Democratic convention, she described the women there as "the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fibre, no-bra-
needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie-chick pie wagons".
Considering such language disrespectful to its readers, the paper refused to run the column, and she quit.
Coulter complained about the Time cover photograph, saying it made her legs look longer and thinner than they actually were.
Clearly another diabolical, left-
wing, liberal-media, Democratic plot.
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Things people wish they hadn't said:
Are they [ politicians] feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special interest groups? Are they working hard to represent their constituents? The people, the American people, have a right to know.
- House majority leader, Tom DeLay, under attack for taking trips funded by lobbyists and special interest groups, in a speech to Congress on November 16th, 1995.