That’s Ambassador Bolton to you, Ryan

Now beginning Muse Malade Meltdown Watch (go to the end of this otherwise-irrelevant-here post on favorite directors for the punchline).

“UN ambassador” is a job that should not exist. And so, like “sex educator” or “conflict-resolution facilitator” or “diversity counselor,” anybody who is eager for the job is, on that very basis, exactly the sort of person who should not have it. We want a UN ambassador like John Bolton who has a healthy contempt for the institution, doesn’t buy the globalist mularkey and sees the institution as at most a means to an end (advance the US national interest) rather than an end in itself (global cooperation as such). The U.N. is not an embryonic world-government, is not a “parliament of man,” does not express some “global community,” and represents nobody other than corrupt dictators and decadent cosmopolitan elites. Nothing was more indicative of Bill Clinton’s mind at work than his saying in defense of the 1991 first Gulf War cease-fire terms that “the United Nations demanded — not the United States, the United Nations demanded — and Saddam Hussein agreed” to turn over all WMDs and related missile and research programs. It was as if the UN had a moral imprimatur to bestow that the mere US did not.

Deborah Orin in The New York Post made the excellent point that to the extent personality matters (though it really doesn’t — ambassadors represent their nations’ governments, not themselves, and they understand that about each other), we want a rough-edged guy like Bolton, particularly one who has the president’s ear, a fact that is demonstrated by Bush’s recess appointment and which would be undermined by a Bolton substitute, someone who would be publicly known to be the president’s second choice.

Speaking of the NY Post, their Tuesday edition had a funny graphic box (not apparently online) accompanying the picture of Bolton and Bush.

Now that John Bolton is U.N. ambassador, he should:
(1) Boot Sudan, Cuba, China and Zimbabwe from the UN Human Rights Commission.
(2) Frog-march U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan out of office for allowing oil-for-food scandal.
(3) Create a U.S. inspector-general for U.N. oversight.
(4) Force the French ambassador to say “Thank you, America,” every time he speaks.
(5) Let Donald Trump refurbish the U.N. plaza.

But in my wildest fantasy, this James Lileks column was a real transcript.