{"id":2799,"date":"2005-04-21T10:14:40","date_gmt":"2005-04-21T14:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/04\/21\/2799.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:50:01","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:50:01","slug":"many-hands-make-short-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/04\/21\/many-hands-make-short-work\/","title":{"rendered":"many hands make short work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So. Once again, Mark Shmitt over at The Decembrist has an excellent post<\/a>, this time on the hoo-hah in today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee committee meeting. For those not paying attention, instead of passing on the nomination of John Bolton (for Ambassador to the United Nations) to the full floor on a party line vote, the vote was delayed when Sen. Voinovich expressed ... caution.\n

Now, I’m of two minds about this. Well, three. First of all, I continue to support the idea that the President is entitled to a Cabinet that supports his policies, and (for the most part) Ambassadors of his choosing. If the only reason to deny confirmation is that the candidate agrees with the President, the candidate should be confirmed, even if the Senate does not agree with the President. If, as has happened recently, the candidate has spoken the real but unstated policies of the President, the candidate should be carefully questioned to ensure that the unstated policies get stated, and make it clear whether they are supported by the President or not. I should add, by the way, that the candidate really should only be responsible for those policies that come under the bailiwick of the position; a nominee for Ambassador to the UN should be responsible for defending past statements about, oh, the UN, international diplomacy, and international cooperation, but not necessarily for defending past policy statements about, oh, Social Security, or campaign finance reform, or the filibuster. In this case, I think it's clear that Mr. Bolton supports the administration, and represents their appalling and dangerous views clearly and with understanding.\n

On the other hand, I do think that issues of temperament and management style are relevant, and there is a distressing tendency to appoint people whose belligerent and abrasive style I find abhorrent. In particular, of course, there is an accusation that he mistreated a woman in his employ, and in a totally unrelated note, I see that Robert Blackwill is now a lobbyist for Taiwan. How's that for paralipsis. From what I understand about him, I find it hard to believe that Mr. Bolton would be persuasive at the UN.\n

On another hand, it’s clear that what I think of as the job of the diplomat (I almost wrote diplomatist, which goes to show) has little to do with diplomacy as the current administration understands it. For the most part, Mr. Bolton’s job will simply be to lay down the policy the US intends to follow, and make it clear that there will be no changes. If there is negotiation, presumably it would simply be haggling over the size of the bribes, and whether they will come in the form of F-16s or tariff protection, or in some more sweetly personal form. Mr. Bolton may not be the best person for those negotiations, but then (a) there is little reason to believe he will engage in them himself, and (2) there isn’t much reason to believe that the administration will honor its commitments in those regards, so there’s no particular advantage to getting the lowest price. So, despite what appear to me to be drawbacks, perhaps Mr. Bolton is in fact qualified, not for what the job used to be, but for what it will be in the next four years, whoever fills it.\n

On yet another hand, it’s clear to me that defeating this nomination will be good for the Democratic Party, or more accurately, bad for the Republican Party. If Sen. Voinovich can get away with expressing caution at this time, then who knows who might express caution next month, and on what issue? And after caution, perhaps disagreement, perhaps skepticism, perhaps even open acknowledgement of betrayal. Well, let’s not get crazy. Still, caution.\n

I will add, if I can gesture with my remaining hands, that should the nomination of Mr. Bolton fail to be confirmed, the Democratic Party should present that failure as a failure of the administration’s policies, rather than as a failure of the vetting process. I think (still) that the frame we want to hang around this administration and its cronies is that of an arrogant and elitist cabal of secretive incompetents, who have betrayed their own party, and its rank and file in the country. Hey, it fits!\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So. Once again, Mark Shmitt over at The Decembrist has an excellent post, this time on the hoo-hah in today\u2019s Senate Foreign Relations Committee committee meeting. For those not paying attention, instead of passing on the nomination of John Bolton…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17388,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2799\/revisions\/17388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}