Originally published on the CGS blog on May 4, 2007.
…or cry, I’m not sure which.
Why did it occur to me to post this? Well, it turns out John Bolton won a Bradley Prize yesterday. His acceptance speech was a brief rant on the importance of fighting liberal government bureaucracies as a conservative political appointee. In other words, be a headache for your liberal colleagues and, in Bolton’s particular case, push back against the instructions of your quasi-internationalist Secretary of State.
And why should one do that? In essence, according to John Bolton, because some higher-level political appointees have “gone native,” adopted the culture of their bureaucracies, and are ignoring their legitimate democratic mandate to govern conservatively.
My favorite part of the speech, though? It had to be his grouping Sens. Lincoln Chafee and Chris Dodd together with Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Syria:
There are, of course, many other people I should mention. For example, I should note Senators Lincoln Chafee and Chris Dodd, who did so much to help make me eligible for this Prize. Prominent citizens of Pyongyang, Havana, Damascus, Tehran and elsewhere also pitched in, simply by being themselves.
Mr. Bolton is a private citizen and his views are mostly irrelevant at this point, so I won’t take up too much space on this blog dealing with his latest. But this one was just too good to pass up.
