VDH on Bolton and His Enemies

I was glad to see the President defend John Bolton at last night's press conference, and I hope he and his allies make a full court press to ensure that the absurd charges against his nominee to become America's U.N. ambassador don't stick. Having already been confirmed by the Senate four times in two administrations, Bolton deserves to add a new title to his resume, more for our sake than for his.

This morning, Victor Davis Hanson combines his usual grasp of facts with his (also normal) sense of moral outrage to defend John Bolton in the Washington Times. The best paragraphs of his op-ed are reserved for a frank look at the records of some of Bolton's harshest critics. As Hanson shows, they're public lives hardly give them room to cast stones at John Bolton:

Then there is the unmentioned hypocrisy of John Bolton's most vociferous inquisitors. California Sen. Barbara Boxer slams the nominee in the manner she hammered Condoleezza Rice. Yet she paid her own son a six-figure fee out of her publicly raised campaign funds. In another scandal, Mrs. Boxer circumvented channels to ram through special favorable legislation for the Miwok Tribe that wanted a gaming franchise. The tribe later hired her same peripatetic offspring as a consultant.

Sen. Chris Dodd now wonders out loud if John Bolton's conduct is indictable. After the recent Enron meltdown that cost consumers billions of dollars, many wondered the same thing about him for sponsoring unusual legislation for his own mega-dollar campaign donors. Mr. Dodd's intervention relaxed auditing accountability and allowed suspect firms like Arthur Andersen to circumvent legal culpability with disastrous results.

Mr. Biden's past slips and slurs make Mr. Bolton look like a Boy Scout. Not long ago he threatened representatives from the airlines with, "I will [hurt] you badly," and dubbed the United States at war in Afghanistan a "high-tech bully." Mr. Biden has fought accusations of intellectual misrepresentation going all the way back to law school -- repeated charges about character that aborted his previous presidential ambitions.

As Hanson says, the point here isn't that Boxer et al. are themselves uniquely hypocritical or evil. It's that, by raising the bar on nominees to an impossibly high level, they bring our democracy's operating to a standstill while making hypocritical fools of themselves. As I've written several times before, Bolton's opponents know that, time after time, the political positions he represents have been right, while those taken by his opponents have been wrong. To boot, as Hanson points out, Bolton's enemies do not see America as a force for good in the world, but instead adhere to the outdated, and never correct, vision of the U.S. as a malign force that, under George W. Bush, has careened out of control. Throughout the battle ahead, it's good to remember who Bolton's opponents are, and what they're made of themselves.

Update: The group blog Confirm Bolton features great posts, with much information, by the likes of Mike Krempasky, David Frum, Joel Mowbray, and Cliff May.