Bolton and the UN -- A Dream Scenario

Here's what I would say to the Democrats about the Bolton nomination to be Ambassador to the United Nations if I were President Bush:

Democrats in Congress have sought to reject my nomination of John Bolton to be Ambassador to the UN. Their stated issues with Mr. Bolton appear to be that he has an abrupt manner in dealing with subordinates; that is, they think he's too tough to fill this important foreign policy position. Essentially, as we say in Texas, John Bolton is a mean sumbitch. Well, I believe that the American people elected me last year precisely because they wanted me to have a tough foreign policy. They wanted us to kick ass and take names. And they particularly wanted us to kick ass and take names in the UN, which has proven itself to be an impediment to American interests abroad time and time again and, more recently, has shown itself to be utterly corrupt as well in the Oil-for-Food Program in pre-war Iraq, as well as utterly inept in its complete incapacity to deal with world problems such as genocide in the Balkans, the Sudan, and Rwanda. I nominated John Bolton to be the new sheriff in town at the UN. I like the fact that some might think he's a mean sumbitch. Me, I think he's a fine man whose toughness is simply a reflection of the fact that he loves America more than he loves Jacques Chirac.

The Democrats don't like Bolton, in my view, because he will put American interests first in dealing with the UN. I think they're wrong. I think we've been doing pretty good so far without much UN help and with a lot of UN hindrance. We've liberated Afghanistan. We've shut down Pakistan's nuclear black market. We've liberated Iraq, killed Uday and Qusay Hussein, captured Saddam Hussein. There have been elections in Afghanistan and Iraq and there's more to come. The peace process between Israel and Palestine is more hopeful than it's ever been, and more realistic. Syrian troops just withdrew from Lebanon. Libya gave up its WMD program. Does anybody really think the UN had anything to do with these positive developments? Not me. As we say in Texas, the UN is all hat and no cattle.

But... frankly, I'm tired of putting good people through the ringer on Capitol Hill. Why should John Bolton have to put up with some ninny coming out of the woodwork to say that he raised his voice to her twenty years ago! Sheessh! Isn't there a statute of limitations on hurt feelings?

So... I hereby withdraw my nomination of John Bolton to be the Ambassador to the UN. I plan to nominate someone else... never. Not on my watch, not during my administration. For the next three years, the United States will officially have no Ambassador to the UN. We will not participate in the UN General Assembly or on the UN Security Council. We will not honor UN resolutions. (And, incidentally, we will not pay any "dues" to the UN.) Instead, we will do what the United States Constitution requires the Executive Branch to do... we will preserve, protect and defend the United States of America and her interests alone.

Thank you. And God Bless America.

Mark Steyn is (again) a genius.

Here is Mark Steyn on the media's reaction to the election of Pope Benedict XVI:

"Apparently, the New York Times was stunned that their short list of Cardinal Gloria Steinem, Cardinal Rupert Everett and Cardinal Rosie O'Donnell were defeated at the last moment by some guy who came out of left field and isn't even gay or female but instead belongs to the discredited 'Catholic' faction of the Catholic Church."

"The discredited 'Catholic' faction of the Catholic Church." Once again, it took smart guys like Steyn (and yours truly, for that matter) about ten seconds to figure out that what the liberal elites in American and Europe didn't like about Cardinal Ratzinger was, in fact, that he was a Catholic. Sheeesh!

The Other Cardinals

You heard it here first: the Cardinals (the St. Louis variety, that is) are going to run away and hide in the NL Central. This is the best starting pitching the Cardinals have ever had: Carpenter, Marquis, Mulder, Morris and Suppan all should win 15-20 games, and each gives the Cardinals a chance to win every game out. The Cardinals faltered in the post-season when Carpenter was hurt and couldn't pitch and Morris was hurt and didn't pitch well. Now both look healthy, and the addition of Mulder and the further maturation of Marquis means that the Cardinals should have four playoff ready pitchers. The Cards are 12-5 and haven't really started to hit yet (Pujols, Rolen and Edmonds are all on pace for mediocre (for them) seasons, and no one has gotten hot yet). When they do.... hoooaaahhh!

Delay and Clinton

The death spiral of Tom Delay is a creation of the national media, a feeding frenzy that once again exposes the media's liberal bias. I am not saying that Delay may have not fudged campaign laws or accepted favors from donors -- perhaps he did. I am not shocked by this sort of thing; I think it happens all the time with many high-ranking politicians; and I think that the idiotic system of campaign financing we have put in place makes hypocrisy practically a necessity if a politician is going to succeed on the highest levels. But why is the media focused on Delay's problems rather than on someone else's? That is where the media bias comes through -- the decision to devote resources, time, energy to ferreting out details about Politician X rather than Politician Y. Consider the following story from the little-read New York Sun about an unnamed Democratic fundraiser who has agreed to plead guilty to felony bank fraud charges and give testimony against David Rosen, one of Hillary Clinton's top finance aides, who in turn is accused of giving false statements to federal authorities regarding fundraising for Ms. Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign. Which is the bigger story? Surely Tom Delay is an important man, the Republican leader in the House. But how many Americans even know that much about him? He's hardly a household name. But Hillary Clinton is a former First Lady, current Senator from one of the most powerful states in the country, and the frontrunner for her party's Presidential nomination in 2008! If some of her top aides are already pleading guilty to felonies related to her campaign finances, that's big news? Isn't it? Then why isn't it on the front page?

From Sandy Berger to David Rosen, stories of seemingly inexplicable criminal machinations by Clintonistas are reported, then forgotten -- we get the "who, what, where, when" of the lede, but nothing more. Where are the reporters who want to explain the "why" of the Clinton corruption stories? There all running in the pack, frothing at the mouth, chasing down Tom Delay.

Cardinal Ratzinger's Final Homily

Cardinal Ratzinger's last homily before becoming Pope Benedict XVI was given to the College of Cardinals before they went into the conclave that ended with his election. Although I hasten to say that the analogies of campaign speeches and campaign platforms are not applicable to the election of a Vicar of Christ, it is safe to say that the statements in the homily were received and understood by the Cardinals as the beliefs of the man that they then elected Pope. Here is the key passage:

"[W]e should speak of the 'measure of the fullness of Christ,' to which we are called to reach in order to be true adults in the faith. We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means 'tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery' (Eph 4, 14). This description is very relevant today! How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. . . . The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves--thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an 'Adult' means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today's fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth. We must become mature in this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith."

The passage I've highlighted marks the point of departure from the elites of the West who have been nurtured on the ideologies of relativism. Those elites are truly "children of the 1960s," because the height of their belief system is the lament of every teenager to every parent: "What gives you the right to tell me what I can do?" But adults know better.

Noonan on Benedict XVI

Peggy Noonan gets it just right here:

"[Benedict XVI] isn't an enforcer, a cop or a rottweiler. He's a Catholic. Which one would think is a good thing to have as leader of the Catholic Church."

Read the whole thing. Noonan is often overwrought, but always in the service of the right things.

They have a word for...

The media are in a tizzy over Pope Benedict XVI because they were hoping that the College of Cardinals would elect a new Pope who would (1) sanction artificial birth control; (2) permit the ordination of women; (3) permit priests to marry; (4) rethink the Church's attitude toward homosexuality; (5) rethink the Church's attitude toward abortion, blah, blah, blah. Why on Earth any serious person would think that that the Church would elect a Pope who would do any of these things is bizarre. They have a word for Christians who believe this litany of things... they are called Presbyterians (or Episcopalians or Congregationalists or any of the other "main-line" Western Protestant sects that have been withering over the past decades).

The media call Pope Benedict XVI "conservative" because that gives them a way of saying that they don't like what he believes that is superficially palatable. But what the media really don't like about Pope Benedict XVI is that he's Catholic -- that he believes and preaches what Catholics have always believed and preached and will always believe and preach in order to be Catholics. Understood this way, the outpouring of vile criticism of the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on websites like The Daily Kos can be seen for what it is -- they have a word for this too -- anti-Catholic bigotry.

Habemas papam!

The real joy on the faces of the Catholics in St. Peter's Square when the election of Pope Benedict XVI was announced puts the lie to the shallow and insincere pronouncements by the Western media about what the Church supposedly needed to do at this juncture in history. They say Catholics needed a progressive Pope, a Pope who would reach out to the disaffected modern Catholics of Western Europe and North America and "bring the Church into the 21st Century." Catholics needed what they have always needed -- a true priest to interpret and preach the Gospel for all time, not just for this time. The talking heads of the media called Cardinal Ratzinger a "dogmatist," as if that was a bad thing. But a church without dogma is not a church at all. They called him a "conservative," as if the whole point of tracing a creed back to St. Peter isn't precisely to conserve the immediacy of what Christ taught his disciples. They call him "staunch," as if bending to the winds of change is a virtue. They just don't get it. The polls of American "Catholics" -- how many of those polled see the inside of a Church more than once a year? how many put any significant money in the plate? how many of them know what is in the Catechism? how many of them say Hail Marys with their children? -- are exercises in mootness. The Church doesn't take polls. Real Catholics have true joy tonight. Habemas papam! We have a Pope!

The Church will be here when CNN is the answer to a trivia question.

Pope John Paul II

As the Pope lingers near death, exemplifying for us all the redemptive power of suffering and the meaningfulness of life, all life, from its beginning at conception through the instant of death, it is perhaps a good time to consider whether he is, as I noted in passing below, the greatest man of the last century. I see only three other potential candidates:

1. Winston Churchill, for identifying, fighting, persevering against, and ultimately defeating the menace of Nazism.

2. Ronald Reagan, for identifying, fighting, persevering against, and ultimately defeating the menace of Soviet Communism.

3. Albert Einstein, for discovering and elucidating the theories of special relativity and general relativity that have fundamentally changed the way man understands the cosmos. (Einstein may not seem to rank up there with Churchill or Reagan, but that may be because we are short-sighted -- states and ideologies appear to wax and wane, but religion and science appear to be modes of truth or truth-seeking that endure for millenia. Communism may return, and who can doubt that virulent anti-Semitic nationalism will someday return, but four hundred years after Newton f=ma, except under the conditions stated by Einstein.)

Any other candidates out there? I can't think of any.

UPDATE: After posting this on www.polipundit.com, I got a few additional suggestions, including FDR and Harry Truman. FDR maybe, Truman no. There might be a case for someone like Gandhi, particularly given the development of India in the past half-century into a stable democracy and growing free market (although ironically you could probably credit the centuries of British influence for much of that as well). You could also maybe make a case for Eisenhower for leading the Allies to victory in the ETO. But I'd stick with Churchill, Einstein, John Paul II. Reagan, FDR and Gandhi just below that. Eisenhower another rung down, Truman another rung below that. There are probably others in the fields of science and technology, or business, that deserve mention too. Thomas Watson of IBM? Bill Gates? Henry Ford? Turning back to politics, maybe even, eventually, W.

Sandy Berger Gets Away With It

What's that smell? It's a rat. Sandy Berger has agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge related to his pilfering of classified documents. Here's the money quote from the New York Times:

When the issue surfaced last year, Mr. Berger insisted that he had removed the classified material inadvertently. But in the plea agreement reached with prosecutors, he is expected to admit that he intentionally removed copies of five classified documents, destroyed three and misled staff members at the National Archives when confronted about it, according to an associate of Mr. Berger's who is involved in his defense but who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plea has not been formalized in court.

What this means is that the former National Security Advisor to President Clinton, at a time when the nation was in the process of attempting, through the 9/11 Commission, to establish how the intelligence catastrophe of 9/11 -- arguably the worst in our history -- could have occurred, intentionally destroyed key classified documents that could have (we'll now never known) shed light on possible negligence on the part of a Democratic President and his administration (including Mr. Berger himself).

What this means is that a senior advisor to a Democratic Presidential candidate, John Kerry, at a time when Kerry and his surrogates were trying to make a case that President Bush had been negligent in failing to foresee the 9/11 catastrophe -- again, arguably the worst single attack on America in our history -- intentionally destroyed key classified documents that might have pointed the finger of blame back at Democrats.

This is worse than Watergate. This may be the biggest political scandal in our history. But, apparently, the Justice Department is going to let Berger off with a slap on the wrist. One would hope that they would enter in the plea bargain only with the assurance that Berger would provide evidence implicating others. Who did he tell about the documents? Who asked him to destroy them? Who stood to profit if the truth was suppressed or erased? Whose legacy would be tarnished if they saw the light of day? Whose future aspirations would be thwarted?

Who indeed? Two guesses.

This is the Democratic Party in the Clinton Era. If historical documents hurt them, they destroy the evidence, secure in the belief that the media will never do to them what they did to President Nixon regarding the missing 18 minutes of tape. If fake documents would help them, they create the documents, secure in the belief that the useful idiots at CBS will run with them without any meaningful vetting.

Is it a conspiracy or is it a coincidence that the Berger story was dumped on a Friday, just when the weather is going to be good for the first time all winter over much of the country, just when the Final Four is going to be dominating people's attention, just when baseball season is starting, just when Terri Schiavo died, and just when the greatest man of the last century, Pope John Paul II, lingers near death? My bet is on conspiracy.