WASHINGTON — When a United States senator publicly declaims, as
Ohio’s Senator George V. Voinovich did this week, that he is
suffering pangs of conscience, my question to him is, have you
considered that it might be acid reflux? Consult your physician,
Senator Voinovich. If your problem really is a problem of
conscience, consult your psychiatrist. Conscience among the
senator’s colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
appears these days to be an abnormality.
The committee is holding confirmation hearings over the
President’s nominee to head our mission to the United Nations, John
R. Bolton. Bolton has already passed through no less than three
prior Senate confirmation hearings in his distinguished life as a
public servant and survived. Now, however, the Democrats have come
to the conclusion that over the years Bolton has been given to
dreadful temper tantrums. At least that is their professed reason
for now rejecting his nomination. Frankly, it comes as a surprise
to me. I have known him off and on for years, and he always seemed
rather mild mannered. Further, one would have thought this shocking
condition would have been discovered in earlier hearings.
Now the Democrats have turned up a couple of Bolton’s
acquaintances who insist anger is his problem. After Senator
Barbara Boxer heard from one complainant, she blurted out at
Bolton’s hearing that he is in need of “anger management lessons.”
Public remarks such at that sound awfully intemperate to me.
Perhaps Senator Boxer is herself in need of “anger management
lessons.”
This week Senator Voinovich said, “my conscience got me.”
Apparently he had just heard of charges of rudeness lodged against
Bolton in an “open letter” from one Melody Townsel, a Bush opponent
living in Texas. The rudeness allegedly took place in Moscow,
eleven years ago. There is no public record of the rudeness aside
from Townsel’s letter read at Bolton’s hearing. Voinovich, a
Republican, has joined the Democrats on the committee in delaying
Bolton’s confirmation until they can review these mounting
questions regarding what the New York Times terms Bolton’s
“temperament and credibility.”
Who raised these questions in the Republican senator’s mind? The
provocateurs were Democrats on the committee, particularly Senator
Christopher Dodd and Senator Joseph Biden. Now what do we know
about these two? Biden was forced out of the 1988 race for the
Democratic presidential nomination when he oafishly attempted to
claim parts of a speech by British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock
as his own. That is called plagiarism, and in the ensuing
controversy it was discovered that this was not the first time
Biden had pilfered lines from others. He even did it in law school.
Moreover, he is an artless blowhard. Many claims he has made for
himself turn out to be untrue.
Senator Dodd is an old drinking buddy of Senator Edward
Kennedy’s who publicly renounced his drinking sprees and
girl-hopping some years ago. So now he is a moral paragon. In the
hearings over Bolton he unveiled charts that purported to show how
the Undersecretary of State had tried to dismiss subordinates in
the State Department. Exclaimed the reformed boozer and Casanova:
“This ought to be indictable.” Senator Boxer, I believe we have
another candidate for “anger management lessons.”
The Democratic Party today has no alternatives to the
Republicans in terms of policy. This is not the party that once
offered America a New Deal or a New Frontier domestically and
“internationalism” then “containment” as a foreign policy. It is a
party bankrupt of ideas and of policy. In foreign policy its great
promise is to throw in with the United Nations, an institution now
proven to be corrupt, ineffectual, anti-Semitic, and anti-American.
Bolton is a staunch critic of the UN’s backward ways, and so the
Democrats think they will distinguish themselves by thwarting his
nomination.
Yet they have given up on taking issue with Bolton in the realm
of ides. Instead they indulge in character assassination. It is
despicable. It is what another of their moral paragons is given to
calling “the politics of personal destruction.” That they have to
resort to such ridiculous figures as Dodd, Biden, and, alas, the
psychotherapist Boxer, as their assassins is more evidence of the
mess they are in. Not only are they a party without ideas, they are
a party without leaders of integrity. One hopes that Senator
Voinovich will discover this over the next three weeks as he
conscientiously reviews Bolton’s record. And one hopes the other
Republicans will take heart and recognize that a governing party
has to fight for its own when they are under fire. Otherwise they
will be dependent on the good will of their enemies.
