The Bolton Factor

What are the Democrats getting out of opposing all these Bush nominees?

They don't seem to be stopping them, that's for sure. But then, that may not be the point.

The Dems didn't want Alberto Gonzales as attorney general; he was confirmed anyway. They have geared up to oppose John Bolton's U.N. nomination, but that seems a long shot. And they're making trouble for John Negroponte and his nomination as intelligence czar.

(Democratic senators are also holding up the nomination of Lester Crawford as FDA commish, to protest the agency's failure to make a decision on the Plan B contraceptive, and of Stephen Johnson as EPA chief, to protest a study that used children to measure the effects of pesticides. Johnson promptly canceled it. But in these cases the objections were not to the nominees themselves.)

If you think about it, the only Bush nominee who has gone down in flames was Bernie Kerik, and he more or less self-immolated.

A minority party has only a few cards to play, so it's perfectly understandable why the Democrats would want to use the recent spate of confirmation hearings to score political points. If they can rough up some of the president's nominees, so much the better. The hearings give the Democrats a platform to garner publicity about their views, for example, of the Patriot Act, the United Nations and intelligence reform.

But is there a chance that the Dems, who have been rock-solid in refusing to negotiate on Bush's Social Security plan, are deepening an image as the Party of No? Do they risk appearing not to have a positive agenda if they're mainly shooting at Bush policies and sniping at nominees? Does the average voter care all that much about whether John Bolton is shipped off to the U.N. or not?

To some extent, Senate Democrats may be playing to their base, which has had precious little to cheer about since Nov. 2, in taking these potshots. But these battles would resonate more if they actually had a chance of blocking one of these nominations, perhaps by drawing a few disaffected Republicans. If Frist really goes nuclear in trying to wipe out Democratic filibusters against judicial nominees, of course, the story will explode into public view--not because average citizens care about the nominees themselves (whom most Americans and even most journalists couldn't name) but because it will bring the Senate to a grinding halt.

USA Today has the latest on the Bolton hearings:

"The former head of the State Department's in house intelligence bureau Tuesday described President Bush's nominee for United Nations ambassador as 'a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy' whose attempt to intimidate a mid-level analyst raises 'real questions about his suitability for high office.'

"Carl Ford, who headed the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in the State Department from 2001-2003, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that nominee John Bolton is 'a serial abuser' of subordinates who berated an analyst and sought to have him fired in 2002 because he disagreed with Bolton's assessment that Cuba has a biological weapons program.

"The analyst was not fired and Bolton later toned down the assessment in a speech. But Ford said the incident 'negatively affected' other analysts to such an extent that he asked then Secretary of State Colin Powell to address the INR staff and urge them to continue to 'speak truth to power.'"

Not a flattering portrait.

"But it appeared that the testimony of Carl W. Ford Jr., former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, had not changed the votes of any of the Republicans who hold a 10-to-8 majority on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee," says the Los Angeles Times.

As for Negroponte, he got an easy ride:

John D. Negroponte, nominated as the first director of national intelligence, promised Tuesday to bring 'fundamental change' to the broad array of agencies he would oversee, and he said the American people were right to 'expect more' after recent intelligence failures," says the New York Times.

"Mr. Negroponte's statements, to the Senate intelligence committee, provided the first indications of his plans for the new job, and they were greeted with enthusiasm by Democrats as well as Republicans on the panel, who said that he faced an enormous task in defining a new role, and expressed concern that his power under the law might remain too limited. . . . "From 1981 to 1985, Mr. Negroponte was the ambassador to Honduras. His tenure there has long been a focus for criticism from opponents who contend that in supporting the Reagan administration's policies in South America Mr. Negroponte turned a blind eye to human rights abuses by death squads trained and partly financed by the C.I.A. Mr. Negroponte's appearance before the Senate coincided with a report in The Washington Post that was based on newly declassified cables he had sent to Washington at the time."

"The report prompted Senator Wyden to suggest that Mr. Negroponte had been 'ducking the facts,' and 'saw things through an administration-colored lens.' But Mr. Negroponte defended his conduct, saying that everything he did was within the law and that previous inquiries by the Senate and other investigators had absolved him of wrongdoing."

National Review Editor Rich Lowry uses the Bolton fight as a chance to rip the Dems:

"Almost everyone agrees that the Democrats are viewed as too soft on national security. How is the party addressing this deficiency? By making its rallying cry, 'Please, don't be mean to the United Nations.'

"This is the gravamen of its attack on President Bush's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. Bolton's chief offense is having been harshly critical of the U.N. through the years. The toughest Bolton quote is that the U.N. headquarters could lose ten stories and no one would notice. The notable thing about this statement is that it is indisputably true. A ten-story subtraction would still leave 29 stories to house the planet's most hellishly impenetrable and inefficient bureaucracy.

"The outraged-at-Bolton caucus has a problem, which is that anything Bolton has said about the U.N. appears mild given recent U.N. malfeasance. He never said that U.N. peacekeepers would rape children in the Congo. He never said the U.N. would engage in insider dealing to rip off its own Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. He never said the U.N. would institute what appears to be a cover-up of its Oil-for-Food wrongdoing. But this all happened, which is why even Kofi Annan says the U.N. needs a thorough overhaul."

Liberal bloggers are hammering Bolton, as with this post on Bob Geiger's Yellow Dog Blog:

"Bolton just flat-out has a long history of having nothing but contempt for the U.N. and, as the rest of the world must say almost daily now, what was Bush thinking nominating this guy for a diplomatic post at that same body? Some samples of Bolton sentiments:

"'There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world and that is the United States when it suits our interest and we can get others to go along.' "'If I were redoing the Security Council today, I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world.'

"'If the UN secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.' "Isn't this a bit like asking a vegan to be CEO of Burger King?"

Marc Cooper| drips with disdain over the hearings:

"Talk about distasteful experiences. Even the most cursory glance at Bolton's record tells you he's about the worst nominee possible. Indeed, his nomination is more in the category of a fraternity prank than anything else.

"Painful it was to hear Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Richard Lugar of Indiana grit his teeth and endorse Bolton. Lugar, a moderate Republican with vast foreign policy experience, is known to loathe the administration's go-it-alone global attitude. But a loyal partisan solider he is. An 'instrument of reform' is how he termed Bolton. Much like calling a hurricane an instrument of urban renewal. . . .

"Most striking to me was Bolton's listless, limp, emotion-free self-defense. Indeed, his whole demeanor reeked of something really, really off kilter. Like he really didn't give a flying flip what the committee, the Senate, the American people or anyone else, for that matter, thought."

I mentioned the Drudge report yesterday on Ed Klein's forthcoming book with a less than fair-and-balanced title: "The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It and How Far She'll Go to Become President." The Washington Times picks up the story:

"A new book could prove a roadblock to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's possible run for the White House in 2008 by promising revelations about the New York Democrat that could cast doubt among voters."

And don't miss this sentence: "Rumors that the book 'won't be pretty' and is brimming with 'new dirt' have circulated in the New York press for the past four months."

Following this NYT report that veteran GOP strategist Arthur Finkelstein had a same-sex wedding in Massachusetts--and this report that he's joining an anti-Hillary initiative--Bill is fighting back.

"Former President Bill Clinton wasn't about to let just anybody attack his wife - especially a gay Republican operative," says New York's Daily News.

"Clinton fired back, suggesting that political consultant Arthur Finkelstein, who has launched a 'Stop Her Now' campaign, is suffering from 'self-loathing.'

"Finkelstein married his male partner in a civil ceremony in Massachusetts in December, with a few of his conservative clients at the nuptial. . . . He went to Massachusetts and married his longtime male partner and then he comes back here and announces this,' Clinton said at a Harlem news conference. 'I thought, one of two things. Either this guy believes his party is not serious, and is totally Machiavellian in his position, or there's some sort of self-loathing there. I was more sad for him.'"

Could Bill be auditioning for a role as his wife's chief counterpuncher?

Andrew Sullivan spotlights a rather strained analogy:

"James Dobson, the religious figure who all but dictates Republican social policy, just referred to Supreme Court justices as the modern equivalent of the KKK. Yes, the GOP is getting even more extreme. Money quote from Dobson:

"I heard a minister the other day talking about the great injustice and evil of the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan, that roamed the country in the South and they did great wrong to civil rights to and to morality and now we have black-robed men. . . .

"Dobson then referred to the coming Supreme Court nomination battle as 'World War Three.'" Sydney Schanberg who spent 26 years at the New York Times, takes a swipe at his old paper in his new role of Village Voice media critic. The subject: a reporter's agreement with Columbia not to seek outside comment on a leaked university report on allegations of antisemitism:

"After all the hammering the nation's still-best newspaper has taken for its major screwups of the last few years, and after installing an ombudsman as a corrective and rewriting the paper's entire ethics code, is it possible that anyone on the news staff doesn't know you aren't supposed to leave stuff out of a story because a source asked you to?

"One Times insider said he believed that the Columbia story may have been the education beat reporter's first encounter with such a request from a source. OK, anything is possible. But what about her immediate editors? Isn't it a part of their job to have full knowledge of the paper's code of standards and ethics? Actually, my reporting indicates that editors were the ones who caught the lapse-senior editors who called a halt when the unholy arrangement with Columbia was reported to them at the late-afternoon Page One meeting-and ordered the staff to seek broader reaction to the Columbia report. The Times did the right thing. It corrected its mistake and deserves credit for that.

"Finally, what about Columbia? What was its administration thinking when it insisted upon these limitations on reporting? This is a university that boasts it has the best journalism school in the country. How will it explain this ethics violation to that student body? Where is the university's mea culpa?"

I held forth yesterday on the problems facing newspapers. One problem for some of us is too many long stories; The Post is making one of its periodic attempts to hold down excessive verbiage, and so, according to the New York Observer, is another newspaper:

"New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced that any story over 1,800 words must be approved by one of a trio of high-ranking editors before it's allowed into the paper. Mr. Keller described the move in an internal memo as part of a campaign against endemic 'bloat' or 'flab'--stories that 'sometimes feel slack or padded.' Though he conceded in the note that budget concerns played some role, he wrote that 'this is not primarily about saving space.'Mr. Keller wrote: 'I'm talking, for the most part, about 1,200-word stories that could be told--better told--in 900 words....I'm talking about features that meander through an unnecessary and uncompelling anecdotal lede and get to the point in the fourth or fifth graph.'"

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is pretty candid about the media's low repute:

"The climate for freedom of the press in the U.S. feels more ominous than it has for decades. One appropriate response is to protest vociferously and seek the passage of a federal shield law for journalists. But it's also crucial for us to reflect on why this is happening now - and a major reason, I think, is that we in the news media are widely perceived as arrogant, out of touch and untrustworthy.

"Judges don't exactly decide cases based on public sentiment, but their decisions do reflect the values of their society. And in our society, public support for the news media has all but evaporated. . . .

"Those of us in the press tend to get defensive about our dwindling credibility. We protest that we've been made scapegoats by partisan demagogues, particularly on the right, and I think that's true. But distrust for the news media, even if it's unfair, is the new reality - and we will have to work much, much harder to win back our credibility with the public. . . .

"We also need more diverse newsrooms. When America was struck by race riots in the late 1960's, major news organizations realized too late that their failure to hire black reporters had impaired their ability to cover America. In the same way, our failure to hire more red state evangelicals limits our understanding of and ability to cover America today."

DC Media Girl is less than impressed by the new National Enquirer and its new columnist, reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith:

"If by 'column' you mean a random assortment of 'thoughts' so shallow they make Larry King's former USA TODAY ellipsis-intensive scribblings look like they were brought down from Mount Sinai."

Here are some excerpts (below her picture in the inevitable low-cut dress):

"Ozzy's Sweet... Sharon's neat I freaked out when I saw on TV that Sharon and Ozzy had a fire at their house. Their kids once said some bad things about me. But once we met, Sharon and I had a blast. I wish I had a mom and I wish it was you, Sharon. You're the best. And Ozzy and the kids are, too.

"Pat O'Brien: I feel for you. Everyone knows you as the guy who hosts The Insider on TV but I know you as a friend. And I know what you're going through. Rehab sucks. There's no special treatment. So be strong. I'm rooting for you. I really wish you luck."

And we wish you plenty of luck, Anna. Looks like you'll need it.