WaPo: John Bolton Criticizes Bill Clinton's Trip To North Korea - Didn't He Get The Memo?

I thought the prevailing theme in the media is that President Obama's foreign policy is the same as George Bush's. If so, then why can't all the former Bush officials shut up? It's like Cheney and Bolton are getting more airplay now, then they did during Bush's Presidency.

My take is that President Obama and Hillary Clinton's foreign policy, while not perfect, has been largely successful. Thus, in order to make George W. Bush look better by comparison, the media types assert that President Obama is simply doing what Bush would have done, as a Newsweek writer asserts in his assessment of President Obama's second 100 days.

In other words, where President Obama succeeds, allege that he is merely carrying out Bush's policies. Where he fails, say it is because he deviated. Of course, this meme would work even better if former Bush officials would shut up.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/04/AR2009080401486.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

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The Obama administration characterized Bill Clinton's unexpected visit to Pyongyang to secure the release of two American reporters, held unjustifiably by North Korea for nearly five months, as a private, humanitarian mission. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has insisted that the fate of the women who strayed into the North (whether accidentally or deliberately is still not clear), should be separated from the unresolved issue of the North's nuclear weapons program.

But North Korea has seen it very differently. Former president Clinton was met at Pyongyang's airport by notables led by Kim Kye Gwan, the North's long-time chief nuclear negotiator, an unmistakable symbol of linkage. In Pyongyang's view, the two reporters are pawns in the larger game of enhancing the regime's legitimacy and gaining direct access to important U.S. figures. The reporters' arrest, show trial and subsequent imprisonment (twelve years hard labor) was hostage taking, essentially an act of state terrorism. So the Clinton trip is a significant propaganda victory for North Korea, whether or not he carried an official message from President Obama. Despite decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so.

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