Opinion: Boy, this confirmation battle over John Bolton is really heating up, writes Mark Steyn.
Mr Bolton is the president's plain-spoken nominee for UN ambassador ("There is no such thing as the United Nations") and the Democrats in the US Senate are reluctant to confirm him for anything other than the title role in the next Incredible Hulk movie. Senator Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Party's comely California obstructionist, has charged that Bolton needs "anger management lessons".
I don't know about you, but nothing makes me want to hurl a chair through the window and punch someone's lights out like being told I need anger management lessons.
So I was interested to hear about the kind of violent Boltonian eruptions that had led Senator Boxer to her diagnosis.
Well, here it comes. (If you've got young children present, you might want to take them out of the room.) From the shockingly brutal testimony of Thomas Fingar, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Intelligence Research:
Q: Could you characterise your meeting with Bolton? Was he calm?
Mr Fingar: No, he was angry. He was standing up.
Q: Did he raise his voice to you? Did he point his finger in your face?
Mr Fingar: I don't remember if he pointed. John speaks in such a low voice normally. Was it louder than normal? Probably. I wouldn't characterise it as screaming at me or anything like that. It was more, hands on hips, the body language as I recall it, I knew he was mad.
He was "standing up" with "hands on hips"! Who does he think he is - Carmen Miranda? Fortunately, before Bolton could let rip with a "pursed lip" or escalate to the lethal "tsk-ing" manoeuvre, Fingar was able to back cautiously out of the room and call the FBI anger management team, who surrounded the building and told the deranged diplomat to come out slowly with his hands above his hips.
Well, I haven't been so horrified since, well, since David Gest split from Liza Minnelli and launched a multimillion dollar suit for damages because she'd beaten him up. As Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, observed: "There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli." Likewise, whatever one's feelings about the UN and Kofi Annan and multilateralism, there's nothing that could get most self-respecting men to appear in front of a Senate committee and complain that John Bolton put his hands on his hips to them. At least, Liza allegedly beat her ex to a pulp.
True, she'd recently had two hip replacements, so if she'd slapped her hands on her hips, she'd have fallen to the ground howling in agony. But my point is: even David Gest might have baulked at complaining about hands on hips.
Still, in the ever accelerating descent into parody of the Senate confirmation process, nothing is too trivial. By the time Senator Boxer and Co are through huffing about the need for anger management lessons, Two-Hips Bolton will be able to walk into every saloon in Dodge and the meanest hombres will be diving for cover behind the hoochie-koochie gals' petticoats before his pinky's so much as brushed his waist.
If the Senate poseurs and the media wanted to mount a trenchant critique of Bolton's geopolitical philosophy, that would be reasonable enough. But there's not even a pretence of any of that. Instead, his opponents have seized on one episode - an intelligence analyst in a critical position with whom Bolton and others were dissatisfied - and used it to advance the bizarre proposition that every junior official should be beyond reproach, and certainly beyond such aggressive "body language" as putting one's hands on hips.
Or as Peter Beinart, the editor of the New Republic, complained to the BBC the other night: Bolton was "disloyal to his subordinates".
It's been obvious for three years now that the torpid federal bureaucracies - the agencies that so comprehensively failed America on 9/11 - are resistant to meaningful reform, but Beinart, in demanding that the executive branch swear fealty to the most incompetent underling, distils the "reform" charade to its essence: we'll talk reform, we'll pass reform bills, we'll merge and de-merge and re-merge every so often, we'll change three-letter acronyms to four-letter acronyms (the immigration agency INS is now BCIS) just to show how serious we are, and a year or four down the line we may well get real tough and require five-letter acronyms (BCINS?). But in the end we believe under- performing bureaucrats in key roles should be allowed to go on underperforming until retirement age. And, if you happen to show you're just the teensy-weensiest bit upset with one of them, we'll blow it up into a month of hearings on TV.
So vast battalions of America's "public servants" sit around all day cross-examining each other about some guy's unacceptably aggressive body language. He put his left hand in! His left hip out! In, out, in, out, he shook them all about!
It's the hot dance craze we all do at the Sinister Neocon Conspiracy Initiation Ceremony: "Ev'rybody's doin' a brand new dance now, C'mon, baby, do the loco-Bolton!" If he doesn't get the nomination, he's got the makings of this summer's novelty hit, Neoconga #5: "A little bit of fingering of my hips A little bit of sneeriness on my lips A little bit of rolling of both my eyes A little bit of petulance in my sighs A little bit of starting to almost mock A little 'You so totally do not rock' A little bit of memo on your desk A little bit of you makes me Hulk-esque!" And, if an underperforming bureaucrat winds up getting Atlanta or Dallas nuked, tough. Better that happen than that out-of-control nutcakes rampage around with hands on hips. After all, as National Review's John Derbyshire put it, deftly summing up the philosophy of this new war: Better dead than rude.
As for the job Bolton's up for, what would make Barbara Boxer and Joe Biden put their hands on hips? Child sex rings run from UN peacekeeping operations? Sudan sitting on the Human Rights Commission while it licenses mass murder in Darfur? Kofi Annan's son doing a $30,000-a-year job, but somehow having a spare quarter-million dollars to invest in a Swiss soccer club?
There are tides in the affairs of men when someone has to put his hands on his hips and toss his curls.
Whoops, I shouldn't have mentioned "tossing his curls".
From Friday's Washington Post: "John Bolton, President Bush's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, desperately needs a haircut. His hair was so poorly cut, it bordered on rude. Bolton might well argue that appearance has nothing to do with capabilities. But it certainly can be a measure of one's respect for the job." They mean it. When it comes to the present depraved state of the UN, John Bolton is hip to the scene, and that's why the multilateral blatherers are wigging out.