Quotes of the day: Notes from the Republican loony bin—Ralph Reed and John Bolton face divergent futures

"Ralph will have to totally reinvent himself.”
—Matt Towery, "a political analyst based in Atlanta who once worked as campaign chairman for Newt Gingrich" and "has known Mr. Reed since his days as a Senate intern," quoted by David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times in "What Next for Ralph Reed?"

“My observations are that while Bolton is not perfect, he has demonstrated his ability, especially in recent months, to work with others and follow the president’s lead by working multilaterally.”
—Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), whose refusal to support John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador last year forced the administration to sneak him in as a recess appointment, in a weasely Washington Post opinion piece Thursday, "Why I'll Vote for Bolton"

Ah, the big Republican loony bin has many wards. And some of the inmates are faring better than others. Poor Ralph Reed has discovered that it's tough to preach to religious-values voters when they're being given a glimmering of what a sleazy opportunist, if not actually a crook, you are. Meanwhile Crazy John Bolton has done exactly the kind of job at the U.N. that people who sensibly opposed his nomination feared he would, and yet it looks as if he's going to get the job for real, thanks to the fecklessness of rubber-stamp Republicans like Senator Voinovich.

I'm a little dubious about this business of Reed "reinventing" himself if it just means he's going to pretend to be somebody different from who he's been pretending to be before. On the other hand, if he's as disgusted as he should be by the person he's been, maybe he really can change. The question then is, who should he reinvent himself as?

Naturally we come prepared with suggestions, beginning with the obvious notion that he has to be an even farther-behind-the-scenes operative than he was before. So, how about:

(a) Karl Rove

(b) Pee Wee Herman

(c) a Russian ballerina

(d) Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest

(e) a hypocritical spewer of fake Christian values who's grasping for power and money any way he can, only not so greedy and dumb as to get caught

(f) all of the above

The Bolton case is messier. Hasn't he been exactly the bullying, extremist ideologue we all assumed he would be? Is anyone really fooled by his endless bullshit about reforming the management of the U.N.? Has anything he's said or done during his year as fake-ambassador provided any reason to doubt that his only interest in the U.N. is to force it to become a rubber stamp for U.S.-neocon unilateralism, and that short of that he will either destroy it or castrate it?

If you not only read what people actually say about him to the NYT's Warren Hoge in "Bolton’s Ways Foil Goals, Envoys Say" but read between the lines (like with all those people who say, "I actually agree with him about such-and-such, but—"), you get the feeling that most everyone who has to deal with him would be happy to see him dead.

His idea of "discussion," notably, seems to be like the Republican idea of "bipartisanship," in which Democrats are always welcome to adopt Republican positions. Bolton has such unquestionining faith in the infallible wisdom of the crack-brained neocon orthodoxies he spews that he imagines he is offering his "discussees" the unique privilege of agreeing with every imbecilic bit of verbal diarrhea that comes out of his mouth.

There was, for example, the day that Bolton—

burst into a packed committee hall, produced a cordless microphone and began to lecture envoys from developing nations about their weakening of a proposal to tighten management of the United Nations, his chief goal.

Gaveled to silence, he threw up his hands and said, “Well, so much for trying something different.”

It was not merely rude, the ambassadors said. One recalled that moments later, his BlackBerry flashed a message from another envoy working on management change. “He just busted us apart,” it read.

In Bolton's telling, according to Hoge, "he had been simply trying to provoke honest debate":

“I said to myself, maybe there’s a way to do something a little unusual here,” he said. “I know it didn’t work, but I think that’s part of what we have to do to shake things up here, to try to do something a little different, a little creative, to try to talk back and forth and engage in a colloquy as if we were on the floor of a parliament.”

Of course, it's kind of hard to have a "colloquy" with a man who believes he's in possession of the final draft of "the truth." Is it any wonder that the Bush foreign-policy machine has had so little success with their "too late, too little" efforts at multilateralism? Who would believe any of it? All the more so coming from a bullying unilateralist like Bolton.

So if Ralph Reed has to reinvent himself, what about John Bolton? Maybe some of the choices we proposed for Reed would work for him too.