The WSJ takes a swipe at...Senator Lugar. For not doing a better job of covering up his own personal distate for Bolton:

We should add that Mr. Bolton would nonetheless be sailing toward confirmation if Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee were doing their job. Senators Dodd and Biden are running rings around Chairman Dick Lugar, who should know on the day of a vote whether he has enough support to prevail. His defense of Mr. Bolton has been so weak that we almost wonder if he doesn't privately wish for the nominee's defeat.

Mr. Lugar's tepid opening statement on the nominee set the stage for the embarrassments that have followed, chief among them losing control of his own committee. Just as embarrassing has been Nebraska's Charles Hagel, whose waffling on the nomination should be understood as an attempt to curry favor with the liberal media and strike a blow for the permanent State Department bureaucracy that he has long allied himself with.

You know what this is really all about? Far more than a partisan fight between Republicans and Democrats as the White House would have us believe, this is really all about a fight within the Republican party about whether all Republicans have to robotically be in lockstep with the White House on every issue, every nomination, or not. Are they allowed a smidgen of independence, ever? Now the WSJ is serving happily as the "fashion police" for the White House on how forcefully Republican Senators need to speak about a nominee Sen. Lugar has every substantive reason and right to consider unfit for that job. And for that matter, that he did almost all in his power to push through committee. He just didn't look happy enough about it for the White House. Is this a trial balloon, a threat, that Lugar could lose his committee chair, a la Arlen Specter, as Chris Nelson suggested earlier this week, if he doesn't manage somehow to push Bolton through? How truly incredibly stifling.

Posted by Laura at April 21, 2005 01:35 PM