Boy, this confirmation battle over John Bolton, the president'splain-spoken nominee for U.N. ambassador, is really heating up. Sen.Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Party's comely obstructionist, hascharged that Bolton needs "anger management lessons."
I don't know about you, but nothing makes me want to hurl a chairthrough the window and punch someone's lights out like being told Ineed anger management lessons. So I was interested to hear about thekind of violent Boltonian eruptions that had led Boxer to herdiagnosis. Well, here it comes. (If you've got young childrenpresent, you might want to take them out of the room.) From theshockingly brutal testimony of Thomas Fingar, assistant secretary ofstate for the Bureau of Intelligence Research:
Q: Could you characterize your meeting with Bolton? Was he calm?
Fingar: No, he was angry. He was standing up.
Q: Did he raise his voice to you? Did he point his finger in yourface?
Fingar: I don't remember if he pointed. John speaks in such a lowvoice normally. Was it louder than normal? Probably. I wouldn'tcharacterize it as screaming at me or anything like that. It wasmore, hands on hips, the body language as I recall it, I knew he wasmad.
He was "standing up" with "hands on hips"! Who's he think he is --Carmen Miranda? Fortunately, before Bolton could let rip with a"pursed lip" or escalate to the lethal "tsk-ing" maneuver, Fingar wasable to back cautiously out of the room and call the FBI angermanagement team, who surrounded the building and told the derangeddiplomat to come out slowly with his hands above his hips.
Well, I haven't been so horrified since . . . well, since DavidGest split from Liza Minnelli and launched a multimillion dollar suitfor damages because she'd beaten him up. As "The Daily Show's" JonStewart observed, "There is no conceivable amount of money worthtelling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli."Likewise, whatever one's feelings about the U.N. and Kofi Annan andmultilateralism, there's nothing that could get most self-respectingmen to appear in front of a Senate committee and complain that Boltonput his hands on his hips. At least, Liza allegedly beat David to apulp. True, she'd recently had two hip replacements, so if she'dslapped her hands on her hips, she'd have fallen to the groundhowling in agony, and David could have run for his life. Or, indeed,strolled for his life, given that she was overweight, barely 5 feettall and a decade his senior. But my point is: Even Gest might havebalked at complaining about hands on hips.
Still, in the ever accelerating descent into parody of the Senateconfirmation process, nothing is too trivial. By the time Boxer andCo. are through huffing about the need for anger management lessons,Two-Hips Bolton will be able to walk into every saloon in Dodge andthe meanest hombres will be diving for cover behind the hoochie-koochie gals' petticoats before his pinky's so much as brushed hiswaist.
If the Senate poseurs and the media wanted to mount a trenchantcritique of Bolton's geopolitical philosophy, that would bereasonable enough. But there's not even a pretense of any of that.Instead, his opponents have seized on one episode -- an intelligenceanalyst in a critical position with whom Bolton and others weredissatisfied -- and used it to advance the bizarre proposition thatevery junior official should be beyond reproach, and certainly beyondsuch aggressive "body language" as putting one's hands on hips. Or asPeter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, complained to the BBC theother night: Bolton was "disloyal to his subordinates."
It's been obvious for three years now that the torpid federalbureaucracies -- the agencies that so comprehensively failed Americaon 9/11 -- are resistant to meaningful reform, but Beinart, indemanding that the executive branch swear fealty to the mostincompetent underling, distills the "reform" charade to its essence:We'll talk reform, we'll pass reform bills, we'll merge and de-mergeand re-merge every so often, we'll change three-letter acronyms (INS)to four-letter acronyms (BCIS) just to show how serious we are, and ayear or four down the line we may well get real tough and requirefive-letter acronyms.
But in the end we believe underperforming bureaucrats in key rolesshould be allowed to go on underperforming until retirement age. And,if you happen to show you're just the teensy-weensiest bit upset withone of them, we'll blow it up into a month of hearings on TV.
So vast battalions of America's "public servants" sit around allday cross-examining each other about some guy's unacceptablyaggressive 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 crazewe 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 thissummer's novelty hit, Neoconga No. 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 orDallas nuked, tough. Better that happen than that out-of-controlnutcakes rampage around with hands on hips. After all, as NationalReview's John Derbyshire put it three years ago, deftly summing upthe philosophy of this new war: Better dead than rude.
As for the job Bolton's up for, what would make Barbara Boxer andJoe Biden put their hands on hips? Child sex rings run from U.N.peacekeeping operations? Sudan sitting on the Human Rights Commissionwhile it licenses mass murder in Darfur? Kofi Annan's son doing a$30,000-a-year job but somehow having a spare quarter-million dollarsto invest in a Swiss soccer club? There are tides in the affairs ofmen when someone has to put his hands on his hips and toss his curls.And, if the present depraved state of the U.N. isn't one of them,nothing is. Unlike most of the multilateral blatherers, John Boltonis hip to that.
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