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December 6, 2006

ABC News

John Bolton – A Fox Quits the Henhouse

Bolton Has Been a Disaster at the United Nations

by Rachel Maddow

Appointing John Bolton to be America's ambassador to the United Nations was the political equivalent of hiring the Marlboro Man to run the nation's stop-smoking programs.

When President Bush was looking for an appointee for the U.N. job, it's hard to imagine him coming up with a worse choice than Bolton.

At the time, Bolton was undersecretary of state for arms control -- his qualifications for promotion included getting himself kicked out of the negotiations about Libya's weapons programs; personally hamstringing efforts to lock up loose nuclear material in Russia; and, of course, his famous argument that "there is no United Nations."

That argument from Bolton led me to hope that if he got the U.N. job, he might surprise us all by just never showing up for work.

Sadly, my hopes were wrong.

Bolton did show up for work at the United Nations, an institution he had made a career out of deriding and undermining.

As ambassador, he blew off the U.N. Security Council mission to Sudan. He botched the U.S. position on the Millennium Development Goals. He said that China should get a permanent seat on the Human Rights Council.

China? Human rights? Really?

That brilliant Bolton idea contradicted the official position of our government, and the State Department had to scramble to overrule him.

Last month, The Economist magazine quoted an unnamed senior Western diplomat saying, "If Bolton left tomorrow, progress would be possible on almost every front where it is now stalled. … He has succeeded in putting almost everyone's backs up, even among some of America's closest allies. His main achievement has been to break the unified coalition of the North and unify the previously fragmented South."

In other words, John Bolton has been a disaster as U.N. ambassador.

Not exactly a surprise, I know.

John Bolton's pre-U.N. career telegraphed exactly how bad he would be at the job. The important question to ask is not why John Bolton was so bad as U.N. ambassador; the question to ask is why was he given the job in the first place.

There is a pattern in the Bush administration of appointing foxes to guard henhouses.

There's John "There is no United Nations" Bolton running our mission at the United Nations.

There's also the mining executive they found to run mine safety. There's the former Dow Chemical executive they found to run a region of the Environmental Protection Agency. And who's now running the nation's family-planning programs?

I have no idea how many people make a living in America in 2006 crusading against contraception, but the Bush administration somehow found one and gave him the job of overseeing family planning.

When you appoint people to do jobs that they're personally, fundamentally, opposed to, surprise!

Those people turn out to be bad at their jobs. But the important political lesson here is not about the incompetence and failure of individuals like John Bolton. The pattern of appointing Bolton-type foxes to guard henhouses throughout the government shows a strategy of failure by design.

The Bush administration has not been bold or honest enough to simply argue against American participation in the United Nations.

They have not argued against mine-safety regulations, or for abolishing the EPA, or the family-planning function of the Department of Health and Human Services.

But in each of these policy areas, they have appointed someone to a leadership role whom they could count on to undermine the office they lead. It's failure by design.

We're better off as a nation without John Bolton at the United Nations.

But we're still saddled with the failure-by-design strategy of the cowardly conservatives of the Bush administration.

I propose a new post-Bolton, post-Katrina rule for American politics: If you don't believe in what government agency does, then you don't get to run that agency. And if you're an anti-government conservative who doesn't believe that there's any positive, constructive role for government at all?

Then stay out of the business of running the government.

Rachel Maddow is the host of "The Rachel Maddow Show," which airs nationwide on Air America Radio affiliate stations from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. ET.

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