Former House Speaker and current front-runner for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination Newt Gingrich has announced that if he’s elected he’d appoint John Bolton as Secretary of State, rather than someone who indulges in “appeasement” as he says Hillary Clinton is doing. Yes, it’s the same John Bolton who ran into trouble being confirmed as UN ambassador under George Bush — but I contend that was due to the facial hair curse.
It’s the same Bolton who is a super-hard liner on many foreign policy issues, a huge hero to the party’s conservative base — it seems the duty of Republican national figures in the 21st century is to try and appeal ONLY to their party base and to forget about independents, moderates, and centrists who are considered to be all mushy or uninformed, anyway — and the one who wrote an introduction to a book on Barack Obama’s “war on America.”
For those who didn’t know that Obama is conducting a war on America, you are in good company because most of the world, Americans and Obama don’t know, either. (Just as most people didn’t know that Hillary Clinton is an appeaser.)
Which gives us a perfect Quote of the Day from David Frum, the former GW Bush aid who has been extremely vocal about how the party he knew seems to have left him as it has veered more and more towards the right and to the talk radio political culture (to the extent that Fox News apparently won’t have him on anymore):
Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that he’d offer the top diplomatic job to the famously rough-edged Bolton reminds me of the shrewd English definition of a gentleman: one who never gives offense unintentionally.
P.S.: Gingrich might instead consider appointing Michael Bolton. (But that might be more controversial.)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.