Letter to Senator Lugar - The Bolton UN Nomination

Office of Senator Richard Lugar
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

Re: John Bolton

Dear Senator Lugar:

I'm a C-Span "junkie" and a long time fan of yours. I really enjoyed watching you in those hearings where you were trying to get John Bolton (I call him “Mr. Diplomat”) installed as our next UN Ambassador. Did anyone ever tell you that you’re very photogenic?

Anyway, I'm just writing to encourage you not to give in to the Democrats and to “Press on With John!” “Press on With John!” is a little campaign slogan I made up. If you want, you can use it the next time Senator Frist decides to put Mr. Diplomat up for a vote.

Contrary to what all those Democrats were saying at the hearing, I agree with you that John Bolton is just the sort of guy we need for that challenging UN job. As you enumerated in your final laudatory remarks – John Bolton has lots of qualifications for the job:

(a) President Bush really likes him (even if Colin Powell doesn't);

(b) He doesn't appear to have a criminal record (well, at least not yet anyway);

(c) With his pleasing demeanor and friendly smile, he’s bound to win us lots of friends at the UN; and

(d) “He knows how to get things done!”

But I wanted to mention another thing that Mr. Diplomat’s got going for him that you failed to mention when you were trying to persuade the Democrats to vote for him – his moustache! I really like Mr. Bolton’s moustache. My grandfather, Sandor Toth, had one just like it. In the country of my birth, people with moustaches like Mr. Bolton’s – the kind that hang over your mouth and get in your food when you are trying to eat – are highly respected. I think Mr. Bolton’s moustache would be a big hit in a lot of Third World countries. You might want to mention the moustache thing to the Democrats during Mr. Bolton’s next round of voting. Hey, you might even want to try growing one yourself!

Of course, and just between us, I think we both know that Mr. Diplomat has some drawbacks. Although you politely tried not to dwell on them in your hearings, it did sort of come out that a big part of his career has been spent in bullying underlings, kissing up to superiors, and shooting messengers. But, hey, as I think you mentioned in his defense, we all do that at one time or another! (I know I do. I’ll bet you do too sometimes. C’mon, confess! Weren’t you kissing up just a little to President Bush by sponsoring Mr. Bolton in your committee hearings? See! We all do it!)

But with regard to Mr. Bolton’s bullying, and so you’ll be ready for it in the next round of voting, I wanted to tip you to the fact that I found another instance of it that didn’t come out in your hearings. I don’t mean that low-level intelligence officer that Mr. Bolton tried to have fired when Mr. Bolton couldn’t get him to say that Castro posed a chemical weapons threat. Not that one. There’s another one! Look at this! I got it from an interview conducted by Amy Goodman on her Democracy Now radio program of June 6th:

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about another U.N. official who was forced out. The Associated Press reporting John Bolton helped force out a top official at the U.N. ahead of the Iraq invasion because he feared the official could interfere with the Bush administration’s war plans. According to the Associated Press, “Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to personally demand that Jose Bustani resign his post as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. At the time, Bustani was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Iraq. If the inspectors had been sent then, they would have uncovered that there were no chemical weapons, a discovery that would undermine the Bush administration’s rationale for war.” Did you know about this at the time?

HANS VON SPONECK: Actually, Mr. Bustani is heading, or headed an organization that's not part of the U.N. system. That is, it's totally outside the gamut of the United Nations. But I think what agitated the U.S. and maybe John Bolton was the fact that he tried at the time to bring Iraq into signing the Chemical Weapons Prohibition Act. And I think that increased -- that led to the wrath of Washington and maybe contributed to the decision to remove this senior official of an important institution.

Woowee! When it comes to bullying people and getting them fired, Mr. Diplomat just seems to crop up everywhere! He was even down in Florida bullying election workers and trying to get them not to count votes in the 2000 Presidential Election! No wonder President Bush likes him! What a guy! He really knows how to get things done!

But like Senator Frist says, when you think about it, we could use a no-nonsense, bullying sort of guy to represent us in the UN -- someone that'll stand up to all those foreigners with their funny-sounding names, and that has, you know, the testicles to reform that place. Let's face it, a reform-school candidate like John Bolton would presumably know a lot about reforming things. An undiplomatic diplomat is just what we need!

Sure, Mr. Bolton’s a little rough around the edges (like that time when he chased that woman all over the hotel in Kazakhstan because she said something he didn’t like that they talked about in the hearings). But I’ll bet after a Dale Carnegie course and a couple of months in anger management he’d be just fine. You might want to offer these options to the Democrats to break the present impasse on his nomination.

Anyway, here’s a pat on the back for trying to help the President. Don’t let Biden, Dodd, and Voinovich (That Traitor!) get you down. Press on with John!!! We're all with you on it back here in Hoosierland.

Yours truly,

Lazlo Toth

Voting for Republicans (both unindicted and indicted)since 1952!

P.S. If the Democrats won't let you put Bolton in there, or the recess appointment doesn’t come through for some reason, don't let it get you down. Keep in mind that there is another equally serviceable diplomatic type ready and waiting in the wings that would do just as well. Yes, you guessed it! I’m referring to the famous heir to the Kotex fortune and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee -- Rep. James Sensenbrenner!!! (I like to call him "Mr. Sunshine"). Like Bolton, Mr. Sunshine hasn’t been arrested either and he too “knows how to get things done." Even better, he could really hit the ground running at the UN, since, as his conduct at his recent Committee hearing has shown (where he turned off the microphones and gaveled the hearing over just when the Democrats were trying to speak about that Downing Street Memo thing), he really knows Robert's Rules of Order!

(Inspired by Don Novello’s Lazlo Toth Letters)

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