Confirmation Conundrum

I haven’t written much about the Bolton nomination because I pretty much said everything I thought about him in the first year of this blog, when I railed considerably about the bizarre notion that an insane, Jesse Helms protege should be in charge of arms control. Garance writes about this over on TAPPED today confriming one of the things that’s bothered me about the Bolton fight; if he isn’t confirmed for the UN, he just goes back to the State Department where he can do even worse damage in his current position. Remember, he was given the UN nomination in order to get him out of there in the first place.

I have no reason to believe that the loyal Bolton will be shamed into quitting the administration entirely. Has anyone? It just doesn’t happen. No, he’ll just continue running around the world having temper tantrums in front of people like Kim Jong Il and browbeating the intelligence community into giving him the names of Americans on whom they are spying.

Nobody leaves a Bush administration official in the corner…any Bush administration. Hell, they’ve revived Eliot Abrams and John Negroponte. Unless Bolton wants to leave, nobody will ask him to. He’ll be back in charge of arms control.

Not that we shouldn’t have fought to take him out. The Republicans have shown that in modern politics you fight every battle to the death and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. It’s a helluva way to run a country, but there it is.

.