(Wing)Nuts and Bolton

Riffing off my "bullies" post from yesterday, I think that's what we have before us as the nominee to the UN. Underneath that Mr. McFeeley moustache, John Bolton is all seething rage:

Many eyes and ears in Washington focused in on the testimony of Carl Ford, the former director of intelligence and research at the State Department. In just under 3 hours of testimony, Ford denounced Bolton as a "kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy" who "abuses his authority with little people." Ford charged that in 2002, Bolton directed an abusive tirade at analyst Christian Westermann for questioning whether Cuba was developing biological and chemical weapons. He characterized the incident as shaking the foundation of the intelligence bureau and said it prompted Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to intervene.

It's truly amazing how angry Republicans remain despite holding almost all the levers of power in Washington. The answer to this conundrum is that only perpetual rage keeps the conservative movement awake. Rage is the life raft that allows conservativism to float over a sea of sensibility (to use a really strained metaphor). If you can just blow up and yell and scream, you never have to make sense, and you certainly never have to apologize when you're wrong. You just get angrier that someone found out you were wrong. When politics, pushed along by Crossfire and Hardball, turned into professional wrestling, it played right into the hands of conservatives. Debate got separated from facts. Making a point was scuttled in favor of humiliating people. And Bolton is an expert at all this.

The Bolton-as-bully connection was also noticed by Laura Rozen, who recognizes that he's not even being a bully for any kind of noble purpose. It's just because he doesn't ALWAYS get his way, and when he doesn't, he turns into a 6 year-old.

From Bolton's testimony yesterday about not having any particular interest in the UN intervening to stop genocide in Rwanda, even with the benefit of all that we know now that close to a million innocent people were slaughtered, it's clear Bolton's bullying is in no service to the good of making the UN save lives, or preventing North Korea from getting nuclear weapons, or Iran. His grandstanding has done nothing to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power. It's just asshole for the sake of being an asshole.

Because there's this weird strategy of the conservative movement that believes that ord'nary Murcans LIKE assholes. I don't know if this is so far off base, but I do think it's necessary to turn the tables on that. Liberals allow themselves to be painted as the kind of niggling self-righteous people to whom it's OK to be an asshole. If that turns, and conservatives become painted as less like "rebels" and more like "dicky bosses" we'd be on to something.