John Bolton, buffoon extraordinaire and recess appointed mouthpiece of madness at the United Nations, has received unexpected support for his reappointment. Only a year ago, Senator George Voinovich (R-Ohio) wept on the Senate floor as he declared that he owed his grandchildren a vote against Bolton’s nomination. This act of conscience lead to his vilification in vicious attack ads as a ‘traitor to the Republican party’.
Crossposted from my blog.

Might that explain why Voinovitch now proclaims it the solemn duty of the US Congress, Democrats included, to indulge the President who defied it last year by recess appointing this clown in the dead of summer? Perish the thought! The reason, says Voinovitch in the WaPo, is that evaluating Bolton on his merits would be to appease America’s enemies in light of the “deteriorating situation in the Middle East”:

For me or my colleagues in the Senate to now question a possible renomination would jeopardize our influence in the United Nations and encourage those who oppose the United States to make Bolton the issue, thereby undermining our policies and agenda.

Should the president choose to renominate him, I cannot imagine a worse message to send to the terrorists… than to drag out a possible renomination process or even replace the person our president has entrusted to lead our nation at the United Nations….

Though a nifty piece of Rovian rhetoric, the above is weapons-grade stupidity by any other measure. On what far-flung planet will terrorists even pretend to give a damn about Bolton?

For the Senator’s edification, here is what actual terrorists — or more importantly, potential such — might give a damn about (click to enlarge):

Don’t believe me, Senator? Then consider, if you will, this sunny teenager cheerfully posing with his brothers and sisters.  

Whatever formative experiences turned him into the world’s most deadly terrorist? Here is Osama’s own account:

I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the [Twin] towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.

I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond.

Sound familiar? Bin Laden continues:

In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.

Even if this is pure rhetoric, and it probably isn’t, it is still a dead-on description of how terrorist intent takes shape in a typical case. How many future “resistants” are being spawned in Lebanon, or in front of TVs around the world, consumed by desperate, murderous rage against America, the West, and their puppet regimes?

Does the Senator think the mad dog approach to counterinsurgency has succeeded brilliantly so far? Has it not pushed Afghanistan to the edge of an abyss dwarfed only by the high-intensity civil war engulfing Iraq while the world stares transfixed at the wrecking of Lebanon?

If this Senator is unaware that the revolutionary jihadi movement is rising like a phoenix from these disasters, then it’s not because he hasn’t been better briefed:

It’s back, a top terrorism expert told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday.

“Today, al-Qaida has not only regrouped, but it is on the march,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. “Al-Qaida is now functioning exactly as its founder and leader, Osama bin Laden, envisioned it.”

[snip]

In the ensuing four years since the [9/11] attack, the organization has evolved into what bin Laden set out to create: a fractured, worldwide movement inspired by bin Laden and united by a single vision, as well as a central organization that continues to direct the implementation of terrorist attacks.

[snip]

“(Islamist) radicalization is increasing rather than decreasing,” Hoffman said. “This is not a fight against the current generation of terrorist, and the next generation is already indoctrinated. What we need to be doing is not fighting the generation after this.“

(Emphasis added.)

But heaven forbid that there be deliberation in the US Congress about John Bolton’s fitness, or lack thereof, for office: the C-SPAN coverage would inestimably aid al-Qaeda!

I’d like to think it doesn’t get more absurd than this, but I’ve been wrong before.

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