Mark Steyn analyzes why outspoken John Bolton is precisely the right man for the job of the Unites States representative at the United Nations:
NUTS AND BOLTON
If you’re going to play the oldest established permanent floating transnational crap game for laughs, you might as well pick an act with plenty of material. What I love about John Bolton, America’s new ambassador to the UN, is the sheer volume of ‘damaging’ material. Usually, the Democrats and media have to riffle through decades of dreary platitudes to come up with one potentially exploitable infelicitous soundbite. But with Bolton the damaging quotes are hanging off the trees and dropping straight into your bucket. Five minutes’ casual mooching through the back catalogue and your cup runneth over:
The UN?
‘There is no such thing as the United Nations.’
The UN building?
‘If you lost ten storeys, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.’
Reform of the Security Council?
‘If I were redoing the Security Council, I’d have one permanent member ...the United States.’
The International Criminal Court?
‘Fuzzy-minded romanticism ...not just naive but dangerous.’
International law in general?
‘It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law.’
Offering incentives to rogue states?
‘I don’t do carrots.’
But he does do shtick. I happen to agree with all the above statements, but I can see why the international community might be minded to throw its hands up and shriek, ‘Quelle horreur!’ It’s not just the rest of the world. Most of the American media are equally stunned. The New York Times wondered what Mr 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?’[link]
Okay, I get the hang of this game. Sending John Bolton to be UN ambassador is like ...putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam’s Iraq chair the UN conference on disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man UN 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 UN fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the UN’s expense?[link]
posted by: jrtelegraph
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