On Bolton and Bullying

[Annie]

No shock here, the US Senators are hypocrits:

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/11904738.htm

Posted on Thu, Jun. 16, 2005

Bully? Bolton is in good company

By Jonathan Last

The vote on John Bolton is coming soon - but not soon enough. The opposition to the President's nominee to be representative to the United Nations has been one of the stranger spectacles in Bush's tenure.

The campaign began with senators objecting to Bolton because he was a "bully" who treated his staffers poorly, abused his power within the office bureaucracy, and was always "kicking down" at people beneath him on the food chain. In other words, for acting like a United States senator.

Tales of senatorial bullying spread like kudzu in Washington. In a town full of terrible bosses, senators are often the worst of the worst.

A 2001 article in the New Republic told the story of Sen. Joe Biden (D., Del.) - one of Bolton's chief opponents - meeting with a group of airline pilots and flight attendants who were asking for his help. "I hope you will support my work on Amtrak as much as I have supported you," he said. "If not, I will screw you badly."

At least those poor people didn't work for him. The now-defunct George magazine did an entire feature on bullying members of Congress a few years ago. Among their findings:

Former Sen. Robert Torricelli (D., N.J.) was once being driven around Newark by an aide, who got them lost. The senator had him stop the car, told him to get out, and then drove off, leaving the poor fellow by the side of the road. He was fond of telling new employees that he "would ruin their lives" if they ever crossed him.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D., Md.) has a "reputation for throwing telephones and any other handy objects when she doesn't get her way." There's one story where the senator berated a woman on the phone for incompetence. She later received a call from the young woman's boss complaining about this treatment. Mikulski's defense: She had thought the young woman was one of her employees.

And lest you think this is merely a Democratic problem, there's Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), whose staff nicknamed him "Mr. Burns" behind his back. Specter is such a fan of kicking down that one office rule is to "Never, ever hang up the phone before the boss does." George reported that Specter "has called staffers back to berate them for getting off the line first." One former employee referred to Specter's office as "white-collar boot camp." So bad is Specter that when his apartment was being painted, no one on staff would volunteer to put him up for the night.

By comparison, Bolton is a gent - even if you believe all the bad things you hear about him. And if that type of behavior is good enough for our august Senate, surely it's good enough for the gooey morass that is the United Nations.

As the Bolton confirmation has dragged on, other complaints have been lacquered onto the brief against him. First, that his views of the United Nations are closer to President Bush's than to John Kerry's. This seems a strange complaint. After all, Democrats can have a U.N. representative who shares their worldview just as soon as they win a presidential election.

The latest charge is that Bolton may have misused intelligence, but this, too, is blowing smoke. The State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have provided hundreds of pages of documents about Bolton who has, himself answered 157 written questions submitted to him by the Senate while sitting through 12 hours of committee meetings. There is no real evidence that Bolton ever did anything improper.

In a strange way, the best argument Democrats had against Bolton was actually their first one: Bullies shouldn't be rewarded with high office. Sure, many of the senators making the argument were hypocrites, but hypocrisy is the tribute virtue pays to vice. As the ethicist Gilbert Meilaender once said, hypocrisy is something of a good sign, because it shows that you can still tell right from wrong.

In a perfect world, people with power would behave well at work and not treat those beneath them badly simply because they can. In a perfect world, "kicking down" would be a serious offense.

But we live in an imperfect world with an imperfect United Nations; and John Bolton is needed up at Turtle Bay.