Truespeak

Apparently Sen. George Voinovich is, if the big bad wolf is the Republican party leadership. I take back everything I said about him. He pussed out, plain and simple.

A key Republican senator on Thursday said he would allow the nomination of John Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to go to a vote in the full Senate despite his conviction that Bolton was the wrong man for the job.

If he's the wrong man then Voinovich should have voted against him and saved the full Senate from having to waste time voting on the wrong fucking man! Apparently, Voinovich decided to pull a Hagel. He'll vote for him in committee but not in the full Senate. WTF? You see, originally I thought that this was just a way for Sen. Hagel to save face. He would vote to send him to the floor but then vote against him so he could go back home and pretend his hands were clean if everything went bad. But after hearing Voinovich's words today, I think there's more to this than just chickenshit politics. Voinovich said:

"I am not so arrogant to think that I should impose my judgment and perspective (on) the U.S. position in the world community on the rest of my colleagues. We owe it to the president to give Mr. Bolton an up or down vote on the floor of the United States Senate."

Do you see it now? I do. This is about the nuclear option. A while ago I posted about my thoughts on the Bolton nomination.

By picking John Bolton, Bush knows that the Democrats will go ballistic. The Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will grill him during the hearings and will most likely all vote against him. However, Georgie's got the advantage. He holds enough votes to get him through committee and even confirmed. So he's kind of killing two birds with one stone, if you like. Not only does he get a hard-liner at the UN, but he can also exploit the Democrats' opposition as more left-wing obstructionism.

Georgieboy doesn't give a shit about the UN. By sending Bolton he's basically giving the whole UN a great big middle-finger "fuck you." Plus, he and his flunkies can roll out the video of Sen. Boxer and Sen. Kerry and Sen. Obama grilling poor John and say, "See how angry they are? See how partisan they are? They're being obstructionists."

This is a set up and now Voinovich is on board as well. The Republicans are using the Bolton nomination as fodder for their anti-filibuster fight. They know the Democrats are going to oppose him and this only helps them to paint the left as the party of obstruction. Meanwhile they're selling their souls to Frist and Rove in the name of party loyalty.

What's truly awful about this is that it's the American people who will suffer so the Republican party can gain a little political capital. The face of America at the UN will now be that of John Bolton. When the world's ambassadors deal with us it will be done through a brash, manipulative, "kiss-up, kick-down" person. But hey, it'll make the Democrats look bad, so fuck it!

So I want to know...Who's playing politics now?