John Bolton and the war against reality

David Sarasohn of my local paper, The Oregonian, has an excellent commentary this morning on the Bolton nomination, Pounding on reality -- and on the U.N. Bolton is the perfect soldier in the administration's war against unpleasant facts that are contrary to the neocons visions of reality.

It wasn't, apparently, accounts of Bolton's repeatedly attacking and threatening officials who disagreed with him, and frequently being wrong, that moved Voinovich and now two other GOP members of the Foreign Relations Committee. It was that ultimate image of Bolton's pounding on the door of the Moscow hotel room, possibly insisting that he was room service bringing borscht.

That moment may have been what undid Bolton, but it was also the moment that summed up both Bolton's record in international dealings and the attitudes of the administration he was being sent to represent:

When confronting reality, pound on it until it goes away.

Bolton has been the poster -- not to say pounder -- boy for this strategy. Insisting that Cuba had bioweapons, he denounced State Department experts who annoyingly kept saying there was no evidence it was true. The way to deal with the disagreement, he suggested, was to fire the experts.

The fact that the experts were right, it seemed, was not the point.

Dick Cheney's warrior:

If your intelligence sources don't say what you want, pound on them.

You can see why Bolton is a favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney, who reportedly insisted on Bolton's being the nominee for U.N. ambassador. Bolton represents the Bush administration policy of rejecting any information that doesn't fit what it already wanted to think.

That meant, of course, rejecting all evidence, from inside or outside the U.S. government, that suggested maybe there weren't imminently threatening weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It meant setting up a separate intelligence office in the Pentagon when the established intelligence offices weren't giving the Bush administration the answers it wanted.

John Bolton represents the Bush/Cheney administration, the ultimate neocon ideologue.

As a Bush administration official told writer Ron Suskind, for Suskind's book on former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

You can see why Bolton's record, even if it unnerves some senators, fits neatly into the administration's pattern. When you have a problem with reality, just pound on it, and on the people trying to tell you about it.

In a related story Steve Soto reports that Colin Powell is talking to Republican Senators in an attempt to kill the Bolton nomination.

Update
Also Also has a post on a headline change from AP. Go check it out.