Recess

Politics seems to mostly remain blessedly on vacation. Bush has made a “Recess Appointment” of John Bolton, who the Democrats successfully filibustered, preventing confirmation. The web is great, Bill Clinton made 144 recess appointments, including an Attorney General for Civil Rights, and an openly Gay Ambassador to Luxembourg. I’m not sure which is the more important ambassadorship, the UN or Luxembourg, but it seems close. How well will the press do at providing some context for a recess appointment?

One of the dings on Bolton of course is that he is “mean”. Ten years ago he yelled at a subordinate, and rumor has it he hung up on somebody at some point. People have mentioned that those items would have gotten him fired in “any corporation in America”. From my experience, those kinds of comments only prove they have clearly never worked in ANY corporation in America … nor based on my limited experience with dealing with global corporations (usually when a computer was broken, and people were unhappy) … at any corporation in the world either. The likely answer would be that either they have never worked ANYWHERE, or that they are simply making the statement up for political purposes, which is the most likely answer.

I heard second hand that Charles Krauthammer was pointing out that when one looks at the 190 countries in the UN, a good deal of the countries are not the kind of garden spots with excellent manners and civility that your typical very nice Democrat is used to. Bolton may have yelled at someone or even hung up on them, but likely a significant number of the ambassadors to the UN have killed more than one person in cold blood, or been involved in ordering such in order to get their plum assignment living high in NYC with diplomatic immunity. It is quite common for the tin-pot dictator de jour to name some crony or another to the post at the UN for “services rendered”. In a lot of the world, those “services” aren’t all that pretty. That is the kind of perspective it would be nice if the general media provided … but somehow I doubt they will get around to it.