Kudos to Bolton for telling it like it is

Mark Steyn wonders why the leftists.etc., would expect the President to appoint those that got it wrong to the UN and World Bank.

The assumption seems to be that, with things going Bush's way in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Bush needs to reach out by stiffing the counselors who called it right and appointing more emollient types who got everything wrong. Each to his own. But as I see it, the question isn't why Wolfowitz and Bolton should hold these jobs, but why Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac, John Kerry and assorted others still hold their jobs.

This is a great question, considering all of the scandals plaguing the UN.

Mark has an aswer for the New York Times editroial mocking the President's selection of Bolton.

The New York Times wondered what Bush's next appointment would be:

"Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate a new set of Geneva conventions? Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission?"

OK, I get the hang of this game. Sending Bolton to be U.N. ambassador is like . . . putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam's Iraq chair the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man U.N. operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else.

All of which happened without the U.N. fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the U.N.'s expense?

Mark takes this a little further:

Yet the assumption behind much of the criticism of Bolton from the likes of Kerry is that, regardless of his government's foreign policy, a U.N. ambassador has to be at some level a U.N. booster. Twenty years ago, Secretary of State George Schulz used to welcome the Reagan administration's ambassadorial appointments to his office and invite each chap to identify his country on the map. The guy who'd just landed the embassy in Chad would invariably point to Chad. "No," Schulz would say, "this is your country" -- and point to the United States.

George Schultz had it axactly right: itis the interests of th US, not the UN or other countries that the US Ambassaodr represents. The leftists in this country have long ago lost sight of that.

Reporting on the Bolton appointment in the Financial Times, James Harding wrote,''Mr. Bush is eager to re-engage with allies, but is unapologetic about the Iraq war, the policy of preemption and the transformational agenda." "Unapologetic"? What exactly should he be apologizing for? The toppling of Saddam? The Iraq election? The first green shoots of liberty in the desert of Middle Eastern "stability"? When you unpick the assumptions behind Harding's sentence, Bush's principal offense is that he remains "unapologetic" about doing all this without the blessing of the formal transnational decision-making process.

Good for him. In recent years, I can find only one example of a senior U.N. figure having the guts to call a member state a "totalitarian regime." It was former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali last autumn, and he was talking about America. Bolton's sin isn't that he's "undiplomatic," but that he's correct.

Do note the Boutros Boutros-Ghali quote that America is a "totalitarian regime." These are the type of people the leftists and dems want the President to kowtow to? Well, based on their rantings and ravings they likely agree with Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Read the rest of what Steyn has to say. - Sailor