Give Bolton a chance

I SPEAK NOW not so much in praise of John Bolton as in dispraise of Boltophobia. Bolton is a fine man, a sharp intellectual, a committed public servant and has the most aggressive mustache in American politics today. He's done a first-rate job as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during his yearlong interim appointment, and were it not for the waffling of Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who has sorta-kinda-maybe changed his mind on Bolton in order to get reelected in liberal Rhode Island, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Even Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), who's had a feck transplant since his acute bout of fecklessness last year -- when he melodramatically decided that he couldn't support Bolton -- has changed his mind. His reason for his opposition back then: Bolton was a meanie. The U.N., Voinovich seemed to be suggesting, needs more Hallmark card moments, and Bolton doesn't come with heart-shaped candies and a tickle-me button on his tummy for the ambassador from Syria to poke when he's blue.

Instead, in Voinovich's view, Bolton was a "kiss-up, kick-down" kind of guy, which made a weepy Voinovich "worried about my kids and my grandchildren." We now know that Voinovich was simply a victim of Boltophobia, a kind of St. Vitus' dance that causes otherwise reasonable people to go into twitching fits over the fact that Bolton doesn't love the U.N. enough. The problem is most Americans agree with Bolton that the U.N. is a cesspool of its own crapulence, stealing American tax dollars intended for global do-goodery while working against American interests.

"We can't argue that this guy is unfit just because he's said mean things about the U.N.," a "top Senate Democrat" admitted to Time magazine last year. "Don't forget, most Americans agree with him."

So instead, his opponents went after him by launching a bizarre assault on his character, using partisan and sometimes loopy accounts of his behavior from more than a decade ago. (Remember Melody Townsel? The Dallas woman who said that Bolton had chased her down the halls of a hotel in Moscow in 1994, throwing things at her and "behaving like a madman.") Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut -- who's reportedly hated Bolton for decades because of disagreements over Latin America policy -- hysterically claimed that Bolton's behavior toward subordinates "ought to be indictable," and California Sen. Barbara Boxer wanted to send him to "anger management counseling." It was all nonsense, and everyone knew it.