Barack Obama is still 16 days away from his inauguration but the Republican smear machine is in full gear. Today’s NY Times–that tool of the liberal media, no less–carries an Op-Ed piece from two key members of the outgoing Bush crew, John Bolton and John Yoo, full of worry that Obama will try to sidestep the Senate’s proper role in foreign policy.
Is that a laugh or what? Bush may have followed the proper form in some instances but only superficially and only when his people recognized they had no alternative. And even then they used half-truths, outright lies and evasions so that Senate Democrats had no chance of the meaningful oversight Bolton and Yoo insist is so important.
Yoo, according to Wikipedia, “wrote memos in which he advocated the possible legality of torture and that enemy combatants could be denied protection under the Geneva Conventions.”
Bolton has a long record of working in Republican administrations. Under Reagan, for example, he was the point man for the administration’s effort to deny Japanese-Americans reparations for their WWII internment and a bill that claimed immigration control is an essential tool for the war on drugs.
GWB tried to appoint him as the US representative to the United Nations, a joke in itself, but the Senate blocked him. This was a guy, after all, who had so little self-control he was booted from the US delegation to the North Korean disarmament talks for calling Kim Jon-Il a tyrannical dictator. Not that Kim isn’t, but a diplomat is supposed to know better than to shoot his mouth off.
Back to the point at hand. In the opening paragraph Yoo and Bolton claim that Obama and Hillary Clinton are likely to “lock the United States into unwise foreign commitments” by bypassing the Constitution’s requirements that such initiatives receive supermajority approval from the Senate. What a freaking laugh coming from the assclowns who mad secret deals with countries like Syria and Jordan and lied their way to a pointless, terrible war in Iraq.
BillSaysThis 