The Great Debate Society

Fire of Liberty

Mark Steyn has a great column on the Bolton confirmation hearings in Sunday's edition of The Chicago Sun-Times. It seems that the Senate Foreign Relations committee is full of people who battle for sound-bytes on the national evening newscasts or cable news instead of getting anything effective done. I guess that's why the Senate is known as the great debate society of America. Here's a bit of Steyn's masterful work:

Still, in the ever accelerating descent into parody of the Senate confirmation process, nothing is too trivial. By the time Boxer and Co. are through huffing about the need for anger management lessons, Two-Hips Bolton will be able to walk into every saloon in Dodge and the meanest hombres will be diving for cover behind the hoochie-koochie gals' petticoats before his pinky's so much as brushed his waist.

If the Senate poseurs and the media wanted to mount a trenchant critique of Bolton's geopolitical philosophy, that would be reasonable enough. But there's not even a pretense of any of that. Instead, his opponents have seized on one episode -- an intelligence analyst in a critical position with whom Bolton and others were dissatisfied -- and used it to advance the bizarre proposition that every junior official should be beyond reproach, and certainly beyond such aggressive ''body language'' as putting one's hands on hips. Or as Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, complained to the BBC the other night: Bolton was ''disloyal to his subordinates.''

It's been obvious for three years now that the torpid federal bureaucracies -- the agencies that so comprehensively failed America on 9/11 -- are resistant to meaningful reform, but Beinart, in demanding that the executive branch swear fealty to the most incompetent underling, distills the ''reform'' charade to its essence: We'll talk reform, we'll pass reform bills, we'll merge and de-merge and re-merge every so often, we'll change three-letter acronyms (INS) to four-letter acronyms (BCIS) just to show how serious we are, and a year or four down the line we may well get real tough and require five-letter acronyms.

I wish that more of these Senators would take a better look at what they look like to the American public. Luckily we have sane writers like Mark Steyn who boil all the problems into his great columns.