I hope you're enjoying the second term of the Cheney Administration.

If you needed any more evidence that Cheney and the neocons are running the show, look no further than John Bolton. Bush just nominated Bolton--on Cheney's wishes, according to The New York Times, to be US ambassador to the United Nation.

Check out Bolton's background.

He was with the Project for a New American Century.

He was a senior vice president at the American Enterprise Institute.

He served as a "senior member of George Bush's legal team in Florida after the 2000 election," as Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service notes.

And Bolton was an aide to Jesse Helms. According to Lobe, Helms heaped praise on the man: "John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world."

Bolton is part of the cabal that is now running U.S. foreign policy.

As undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, Bolton was known as Powell's minder at the State Department, the neocon mole who reported back to Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz if Powell was straying too far from their agenda.

And he tried to impose their agenda even when it ran opposite of Powell's.

While Powell was trying to calm relations with North Korea, Bolton called Kim Jong Il a "tyrannical dictator," which didn't help matters any, even if true.

And Bolton played to the far right crowd in Florida when in May 2002 he, apropos of nothing, said Castro had "at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort" and had "provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states." Days later, Powell himself backed off Bolton's remarks.

Bolton was extremely hostile to the creation of the International Criminal Court, and Lobe notes that Powell let Bolton sign the formal notification to Kofi Annan that the U.S. was pulling out. According to Lobe, Bolton told The Wall Street Journal that was "the happiest moment of my government service."

Bolton is particularly ill equipped to be US ambassador to the United Nations because he's on record as saying "there's no such thing as the United Nations" and that "it wouldn't make a bit of difference" if the UN building "lost 10 stories."

Writing in the Weekly Standard on October 4, 1999, he denounced what he called "Kofi Annan's UN Power Grab." And he said that President Clinton, in defending NATO's intervention in the Balkans, should have rejected Annan's claim that the United States should have come to the Security Council. "The correct American response, for those who supported the NATO campaign, is: "We did not need the Security Council's permission to act." That's familiar language. In fact, it's the Bush Administration mantra.

Cheney and the neocons believe they don't need anybody's permission to act. Cheney was quoted in The Washington Post on January 20 as saying that Bush Senior didn't even need Congress's approval to go to war against Iraq back 1991.

In April 2000 at the American Enterprise Institute, Bolton presided over a conference entitled "Trends in Global Governance: Do They Threaten American Sovereignty?" The agenda was stacked from the outset. The goal of the conference was to "address the extent to which America's freedom of action internationally and its own internal governance--its sovereignty and its constitutionalism--should be constrained by international organizations and agreements."

Conservatives are beside themselves with joy. "He's been our man at the State Department," David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, told The New York Times.

Frank Gaffney, another Project for the New American Century alum, hailed the nomination for National Review online in an article entitled "A Bolt of Good Sense: John Bolton is the right man for the U.N."

He certainly is the right's man.

© 2005 The Progressive

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