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Two pieces from the LA Times on l'affaire Bolton: Richard Simon mines Sen. George Voinovich's career to understand his surprise withdrawal of support for Bolton yesterday:
In other words, Voinovich can afford to tell Cheney when he calls, you know what. And the White House mafia failed to intimidate Voinovich a couple years ago, Simon reports:But Democrats, in considering who among the moderate Republicans might be persuaded to support their case against Bolton, knew Voinovich was a possibility, a Democratic staffer said.
That's because the Ohio lawmaker also sits on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where "he has been a stickler on management issues and the way subordinates are treated," the staffer said. "He gets really incensed at jerks."
Voinovich's questioning of Bolton's nomination is certain to make him a target of heavy lobbying by the White House and fellow Republicans.
But he is in a particularly strong position to be independent: Unlike Chafee, another moderate with qualms about the nomination, Voinovich, 68, does not need the party's support for a reelection campaign in 2006. He was reelected to a second term in 2004 with 64% of the vote.
Lovely. Voinovich hates jerks. And he's golden in his home state. Honestly, it's so refreshing, when even Bolton's defenders' most ringing endorsement of the man is that his mistreatment of underlings shouldn't be an issue because others before him have behaved appallingly too.When Voinovich was slow to back Bush's tax cuts, he was the target of a television ads in his home state that pictured him next to the French flag at a time when France was opposing the U.S. war in Iraq.
Sonni Efron's piece on the Bolton hearings has new information on several of the cases of Bolton's alleged mistreatment of people, including a witness who corroborates the chaos in Moscow.
And wow, Covington and Burling did not invite former partner Bolton to return after he served in Bush I, because "of abusive treatment of subordinates there"? Is this a man who is in Republican administrations because he can't hold a job in the private sector because he's so abusive his firms would get sued? Have there been lawsuits settled against him? You and I know the type -- serial abusers, and Bolton is one, serial abuse, and there will be more people coming out of the woodwork.
And then there is the case of the former DOJ attorney Bolton tried to get dismissed for taking maternity leave. Joan Bernott, a Republican and Federalist Society member, is now a muckety muck at the Department of Commerce and perhaps the Senators should subpoena her to testify. Bolton's invasion of her privacy and sheer viciousness in that case is so appalling, it verges on the truly perverse. Senators Boxer and Biden need to follow up here with a conversation with Bernott.
Which brings me to the 10 times Bolton requested the identity of the US persons in classified NSA intercepts he had obtained, about which we will surely learn more. John Bolton misuses intelligence the way communists use it in police states -- against his internal enemies. It's classic police state tactics. But intelligence should be used in democracies to advance national security, not to gather ammunition on internal perceived bureaucratic enemies. Of course, Bolton just thinks of it as "opposition research" against the internal opposition. But using the vast reach of US intelligence powers to achieve opposition research crosses the line. Bolton behaves like a scheming apparatchik in a police state. Senators Biden and Lugar must press the State Department to release to the Senate Foreign Relation Committee the NSA intercepts that Bolton demanded he not only be provided with, but get the identities of the US persons redacted as a matter of US law. When Americans understand more about the lengths Bolton went to use US government intelligence to gather information on his colleagues, they will be appalled. I don't think it will sit well with the Senators either.
US official misuse of intelligence on American citizens is not something that sits well with Americans. You think a lot of people watched the hearing yesterday? The State Department switchboards were going nuts yesterday, Lugar mentioned during the hearing. Americans are paying attention, and they don't like what they're learning about Bolton or the Bush administration for making such a careless nomination. Why doesn't the Bush administration send someone to the UN who acts like a member of a liberal democracy, and not a police state apparatchik? Here are some more inspired choices that should sit well with Republicans and Democrats, those who care about UN reform and humanitarian causes.