The Release Of Laura Ling and Euna Lee-- John Bolton And The Right Wing Skunks At The National Picnic

Yesterday I was in a board meeting all day in San Francisco. When I was returning home from Oakland to Burbank I found out that President Clinton's trip to Pyongyang had been successful and that the two American journalists would be flying back to Burbank a few hours after me. Everybody was really happy. It was a feeling on shared collective joy. Well... not everybody. Along with the relief and happiness normal people felt at the happy ending of a human tragedy for came the partisan bitching from the We-Want-America-To-Fail crowd. John Bolton, widely considered the worst UN Ambassador in the history of the UN-- a UN Ambassador nominated by Bush as a display of disdain towards collective security and the ideals of the UN and as an affront to that organization, who was never confirmed and was snuck in through a back door for a quick and dirty tenure, led the charge. When the announcer on the TV screen at the Oakland Airport announced Bolton was denouncing Clinton's successful trip 5 seconds after the station announced that Laura Ling and Euna Lee were being freed and returning to the U.S. with Clinton, the waiting passengers started booing and hissing.

Bolton called it "rewarding bad behavior" and negotiating with terrorists. He denounced Clinton for legitimizing the North Korean regime. "I think this is a very bad signal because it does exactly what we always try and avoid doing with terrorists, or with rogue states in general, and that's encouraging their bad behavior," Bolton said. "I think this is a win-win for North Korea."

Bolton works for a right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute that is an unswerving proponent of wars-- and war profits. It is funded by war profiteers and has pushed the U.S. towards unwarranted wars at every opportunity. Although he himself avoided fighting in the Vietnam War, he was an hysterical proponent of it and a Goldwater supporter in college. He only got worse as time went on-- opposing reparations for Japanese-Americans illegally interred during World War II, smearing immigrants long before Lou Dobbs "re-invented" the scam as his ticket to fame and fortune, opposing the International Criminal Court and derailing attempts to cut back on weapons of mass destruction, particularly biological and chemical weapons, which Bolton appears to have a soft spot for. He was considered the first of the Bush Regime operatives to misuse and distort intelligence reports to bolster his policy ambitions-- like trying to provoke American attacks on Cuba (unsuccessful), Iran (unsuccessful), Syria (unsuccessful), North Korea (unsuccessful) and Iraq (successful). More recently, he's been trying to drum up support for backing an Israeli strike against Iran. He actually denounced Bush in his frightening far right screed, Surrender is Not An Option, for not being aggressive enough foreign policy-wise. His nomination as Ambassador failed because a number of mainstream Republicans-- Richard Lugar, George Voinovich, Lincoln Chafee, Lisa Murkowski, and Chuck Hagel (as well as, surrepticioulsy, Colin Powell)-- felt almost as strongly as the Democratic Senate minority that he was unfit for the job. Bolton's position is being bolstered by those who have already stated their preference to see America fail if it means Obama succeeding-- particularly the far right propaganda brigade at Fox TV.

Hannity’s opening comment for the discussion set the damn-the-release-with-faint-praise tone. “Nobody’s unhappy here that these journalists were released. We’re all happy about it.” Then, without another thought for the well-being of the released journalists, he spent the rest of the segment focused on attacking Bill Clinton for negotiating with a dictator and accusing President Obama of staging the release as a PR stunt... Hannity took it a step further by suggesting that some conspiracy to undermine the country was afoot. “Did America… potentially give up something that we may not find out about for some time?”

...But Hannity was not done smearing. “Obama’s poll numbers have been going down (actually, they’ve been ticking up), the stimulus has failed (wrong again), people have turned against health care (not really), …and then this news breaks. This is gonna be the news in every newspaper across the country, every newscast across the country… When you have bad news like this, you want to change the topic.”

Bolton, his financial backers in the Military Industrial Complex, and the media outlets and shills they own, consider any outcome that doesn't involve bombing or threats of bombing to be giving in to terrorism. These people are crazy and dangerous and it is important to remember that as bad as the Blue Dog and DLC creeps are-- and they are very bad-- at least they don't include the links of John Bolton in their ranks. This one is all Republican (although it should also be remembered that 3 reactionary Democrats, Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson and Mark Pryor, did vote with the Republicans in favor of Bolton).