April 23, 2005 - “I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the vote.'" That is how John Bolton introduced himself to a team of Tallahassee election workers in December 2000. He was then part of the Bush-Cheney team of lawyers sent to Florida to control and then prevent the recount. When asked what position Bolton should have in the new administration Vice-President Elect Richard Cheney replied, “Any thing that he wants.” When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Bolton’s nomination as UN Ambassador she said, "The president and I have asked John to do this work because he knows how to get things done." As the President says, sometimes politics does get in the way of the peoples’ business.

As one after another career diplomat reveals personal experiences casting doubt on the nominee’s qualifications to act diplomatically as America’s spokesman to the world and as one after another Republican Senator expresses reservations as Mr. Bolton’s suitability for the job, the Administration is closing ranks and blaming the nominee’s temperament troubles on politics and a Democrat smear campaign. Perhaps bullying behavior has some place in political discourse at some level but the repeated pattern by which John Bolton has dealt with disagreement is more than just style. It evidences a state of mind that forces facts to comply with ideological objectives by cowing the investigator reporting the facts. Refusal to consider alternatives is not an emblem of strength; it is rather the mark of folly.

That John Bolton may have been boorish, inconsiderate, and rude to subordinates is not the issue. Whether America’s spokesman will insist that he be blinded to inconvenient facts is the issue. Will he selectively edit the information he passes back to the White House, tailoring it to fit a pre-conceived objective? Sixty years ago this month the delusion of hearing only favorable information and relying only on optimistic forecasts infected the highest levels of German government. Purveyors of bad news were not just hectored, they were executed. Facts were labeled as defeatist when they exposed the inevitability of defeat in Berlin. It is that same stubborn insistence that only that information that supports an ideological position can be accurate that led to the delusion of an Iraqi arsenal of unconventional weapons poised to attack America being accepted, embraced and foisted upon an increasingly skeptical world.

If its UN Ambassador shoots the messenger or intercepts the message America is not served. When that happens the accurate intelligence upon which we expect that our leaders will base sound decisions is degraded into “anything he wants “ and that is when politics really gets in the way of the people’s business.