6/22/20
John Bolton is a jerk. John Bolton always has been a jerk. And John Bolton will always be a jerk. I didn’t want to use the word “jerk,” but the
nature of this blog as a source of education for the entire family forbids me
from using the compound word I would have rather used.
Given my generally conservative politics, one might guess
that my displeasure with Mr. Bolton arises from The
Room Where It Happened, A White House Memoir, the soon to be
released “Guess what I heard?” collection of tales from the Trump White
House. But one would be wrong in
this supposition; long time readers know that my distaste for Mr. Bolton goes back
many years, at least to the second Bush administration. That Mr. Bolton’s scribbling harms President
Trump’s chances at re-election are not a big deal to yours truly for at least four
reasons:
·
Mr. Bolton hurts his credibility by venturing
from the eminently believable to the laughably outrageous. For example, the charge that Mr. Trump believes
that Venezuela is, or was, part of the United States is just
idiotic. Even today’s typical high
school student, deprived of exposure to geography in favor of modern “education’s”
insistence on the generalized indoctrination we call “social studies,” realizes
that Venezuela is on a different continent and never was a U.S. colony, at
least in the formal sense. (Doesn’t
he?) So one doesn’t have to be an ardent
Trump hater to realize that this assertion on Mr. Bolton’s part is so outrageous
that it calls into question the rest of Mr. Bolton’s narrative.
·
Even if we assume that most of the tales Mr. Bolton
tells are true, the generalized picture he presents of Mr. Trump as something
of a self-consumed lout whose vanity is exponentially more vast than his knowledge
of foreign policy is nothing new and will change few votes.
·
Mr. Trump’s chances at re-election were microscopic
before Mr. Bolton started scribbling.
See PRESIDENT
TRUMP WILL NOT BE RE-ELECTED, written on 4/22/20, and note the earliness of
that display of perspicacity.
·
While, considering the alternative, I would
prefer that Mr. Trump not lose, whether he gets re-elected still results in
yours truly engaging in an internal soliloquy worthy of Hamlet.
It’s not that Mr. Bolton’s literary display of petulance doesn’t
bother yours truly, but the source of my distaste does not lie in politics but,
rather, in the quaint old notions of statecraft, patriotism, and honor. Mr. Bolton should have had the decency to keep
his mouth shut on the sensitive national security matters he discusses in his
book. How open and straightforward can people
be when they are continually nagged by the notion that what they say might be
shared, and selectively so, with millions, some of whom are not nice people and
have very little compunction about displaying their level of hostility, throughout
the world? And in which facet of his
job does the president, whoever s/he might be, need honest straight talk more than
s/he needs it in foreign policy? Even
though this President only wants to hear what he wants to hear, there may be a
day in distant future when we have a president who knows what s/he is doing and
would like to get a wide range of opinions, freely and unsparingly delivered,
before taking actions of the gravity involved in many foreign policy actions. Having a petulant (wo)man-child with a
penchant for revenge in the same room is not conducive to the advancement of such
honest, often displeasing and unpopular, opinions.
All that having been said, the problem that Mr. Bolton
presents for Mr. Trump lies not so much in the content of the book Mr. Bolton
has produced. The problem that Mr.
Bolton presents is that his very appointment in April of 2018 was an exemplar
of the very lack of judgment, bordering on recklessness, that Mr. Trump displays
in his scattershot approach to his job.
Mr. Trump got elected in 2016 for a number of reasons, most
of which had their genesis in revulsion at his opponents, both in the primary
and especially in the general elections, and the political establishment they
represented. One of the major issues on
which many of Mr. Trump’s voters, and certainly this voter, could nearly
wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Trump rather than merely disagree with his opponents,
was foreign policy. Other than Senator
Rand Paul, Mr. Trump was the only Republican in the 2016 primary field who
spoke out with great vigor and commitment, bordering on passion, against the
Bush/Obama foreign policy that saw thousands of American troops stationed,
and dying, all over the world for reasons that were never clearly, let alone honestly,
delineated. People didn’t see it as America’s
role to expend blood and treasure for nebulous reasons that seemed to benefit,
if anybody, certainly not the working-class families whose kids were sent off
on Messrs. Bush’s and Obama’s excellent adventures. People were, to put it simply, sick and tired
of America’s being the global policeman that candidate George W. Bush
promised we wouldn’t be if he were elected only to renege on this promise nearly
instantaneously upon being elected. The people were further agitated when nothing
of substance changed under President Obama, despite his being elected to
a large extent on his promises to reverse Mr. Bush’s blundering, seemingly
pointless, ridiculously expensive and outright dangerous foreign policy that
set back American diplomatic progress by decades. In 2016, when most of the Republican field
displayed obsequious fealty to the disaster that was Mr. Bush’s foreign policy
and the Democrats selected Mr. Obama’s chief diplomat as their standard-bearer,
Mr. Trump derided the Bush/Obama, fight to the last working class kid for who
knows what foreign policy While it was
not his foreign policy alone that got Mr. Trump elected, it certainly garnered
him enough votes to put him in the White House in his close race with Mr. Obama’s
Secretary of State.
So imagine the shock to those of us who voted for Mr.
Trump largely on the basis of his opposition to the Bush/Obama approach to
foreign affairs when he appointed John Bolton, one of the chief architects of
this policy, as his national security advisor? It was a betrayal that would have garnered
more attention if the public hadn’t by that time grown so accustomed to the
President’s casual attitude toward things like principle and ideals. The selection of Mr. Bolton confirmed for us
that Mr. Trump was a liar, a man of no principle, a man with not even the vaguest
familiarity with the people he was putting in charge, or a combination of the
all of the above. Yours truly vowed
NEVER to vote for Trump as long as Mr. Bolton, whom I would refer to as Mr. Bush’s Nostradamus if I didn’t think Mr.
Bush were at least as culpable as Mr. Bolton in his ruinous foreign policy,
remained national security advisor. Not
only was Mr. Bolton’s foreign policy under Mr. Bush perhaps the seedling from
which the ruin of our nation will spring but also Mr. Bolton’s appointment lent
credence to those who argued that Mr. Trump had, and has, no clue regarding the
issues he is charged with considering and has a tendency to forget on Tuesday
what he said on Monday.
So while Mr. Bolton’s book may not be as harmful as many
imagine to Mr. Trump’s nearly non-existent re-election chances as many suppose (See, again, my 4/22/20
post.), the very resurfacing of Mr. Bolton reminded us of the lack of introspection,
and perhaps the lack of character, of the man we have in the White House, and Mr.
Bolton did so without producing one page of his soon-to-be-forgotten screed.
One more thing…
The breathless attention that the press is paying to Mr.
Bolton’s bout of bumptious braying is yet further proof that If the media weren’t
so pathetic, they’d be hilarious. The
same people who insist that we must pay unwavering attention to every utterance
of Mr. Bolton now that he is ripping Mr. Trump are the same crew that seethed
with even more contempt for Mr. Bolton than does yours truly when Mr. Bolton
was more or less in charge of foreign policy in both the second Bush and Trump
administrations. They were right then;
they are wrong now. But these are not
people to let intellectual consistency and honesty interfere with a jihad of
the type in which they are currently engaged.
