Biting the Hand that Fed You

Short of staging a coup, ultra-right winger John Bolton is a spent force destined for the musty basement of one of the loonie think tanks his type love so much. That's not to say he'll go quietly. Not his style, never was.

Bolton's latest target? Why it's Bush/Cheney, naturally. Bolton thinks they've gone soft, turned into real pussies, let down the team and he's not afraid to tell the world just that. From The New York Times:

"Mr. Bolton, who served first as the State Department’s chief arms control official, argues that the administration has abandoned the unilateralist strategy it followed at the beginning when it bolted from the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that limits the emissions of greenhouse gases from most industrialized countries; “unsigned” the agreement that created the International Criminal Court and abrogated the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.
He says that only a fundamental change in government, not negotiations, will divert Iran and North Korea from the nuclear path.

“They are not going to give up their nuclear weapons voluntarily,” Mr. Bolton said in the interview. “They might be forced to give up their nuclear weapons, but that is not the policy that we’re pursuing. So the consequence of the policy is that it won’t achieve the stated objective and it will have the effect of legitimizing and reinforcing two fundamentally illegitimate regimes.”

He said North Korea’s apparent assistance to Syria in the construction of what analysts and officials said was a nuclear reactor showed that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, was already violating its pledge in February to dismantle its nuclear weapons program even though the administration points to a recent trip by Americans to a North Korean nuclear reactor to begin disabling the facilities.
In the case of Iran, Mr. Bolton said: “I think this is a very difficult question that has to be very carefully thought out. The choice is not between the world as it is today and the use of force. The choice is between the use of force and Iran with nuclear weapons.”

Bolton, who never met a little country he didn't despise enough to want bombed, is living proof that the far right of the Republican Party isn't going away anytime soon. In fact several of the leading candidates for the party's presidential nomination seem far more hawkish than Bush on issues such as Iran. Maybe we'll see a Bolton comeback after all - he'll be one of those four guys on horseback.