Early last week, a group of seven Democrats and seven Republicans in the U.S. Senate struck a compromise aimed at averting a showdown over the unprecedented attempts of minority Democrats to block the most prominent of President Bush's judicial nominees.
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(The Constitution merely requires confirmation by a majority of the Senate; the Republican Party controls a majority of votes there.)
Without many cards to play, the outvoted Democrats saved face -- and preserved their filibuster power, for now -- by vowing to resort to a filibuster to block judicial nominations which have majority support only in "extraordinary circumstances."
The deal did not cover other nominations, like that of U.N. Ambassador-designate John Bolton. Still, some had hoped the willingness of Republicans to grant the face-saving deal might bring with it a new acknowledgement on the part of Democrats that the president has the right and power to fill such positions as ambassadorships with any qualified candidates of his choice.
Apparently not. On Thursday, Democrats refused to end debate on the nomination of John Bolton to be U.N. ambassador, with Minority Leader Harry Reid vowing they will not do so until the Bush administration breaks with precedent and releases normally secret internal State Department memos.
What do the Democrats have against Mr. Bolton?
They contend he is ornery and mean, and has repeatedly stated that the United Nations is a scandal-ridden organization in need of reform, which was not very "diplomatic" of him.
The thing is, the United Nations is an organization which is scandal-ridden and in need of reform -- if it can be saved, at all.
Intended as a place for serious world leaders to hammer out compromises in lieu of resorting to the battlefield, the outfit has increasingly become a nest of smug and overpaid Third World bureaucrats double-parking their limousines as they spend their poor nations' meager resources in the shops of Fifth Avenue, fantasizing about a world socialist state, condoning a paralyzing level of corruption and genocide and racism so long as the perpetrators are not of European extraction, while condemning the free markets which made the West wealthy and meantime insisting those wealthy nations continue to "share."
Mr. Bolton once told an audience, "The (U.N.) Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If you lost 10 stories today, it wouldn't make a bit of difference," the hyperventilating Democrats whine. Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., condemns this as "blatant hostility toward the institution at which he would serve."
And Sen. Feingold's point is ... ?
Jeane Kirkpatrick, perhaps our best (and best-remembered) U.N. ambassador in recent decades, was effective precisely because she was plainspoken.
For heaven's sake, this is a job that was long held down by Shirley Temple.
Is that what Democrats have in mind? Do they think that to dress down the kleptocrats who lined their pockets (and thus helped keep the tyrant in power) by corrupting the Iraqi "Oil for Food" program we'd be better off sending, oh, perhaps, Michael Jackson? Macaulay Culkin? PeeWee Herman? Would they agree to confirm Minnie Mouse? She's never said a discouraging word.
