Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

The Dems' fear of Bolton's temper?

Mark Steyn:

Boy, this confirmation battle over John Bolton, the president's plain-spoken nominee for U.N. ambassador, is really heating up. Sen. Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Party's comely obstructionist, has charged that Bolton needs ''anger management lessons.''

I don't know about you, but nothing makes me want to hurl a chair through the window and punch someone's lights out like being told I need anger management lessons. So I was interested to hear about the kind of violent Boltonian eruptions that had led Boxer to her diagnosis. Well, here it comes. (If you've got young children present, you might want to take them out of the room.) From the shockingly brutal testimony of Thomas Fingar, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Intelligence Research:

Q: Could you characterize your meeting with Bolton? Was he calm?

Fingar: No, he was angry. He was standing up.

Q: Did he raise his voice to you? Did he point his finger in your face?

Fingar: I don't remember if he pointed. John speaks in such a low voice normally. Was it louder than normal? Probably. I wouldn't characterize it as screaming at me or anything like that. It was more, hands on hips, the body language as I recall it, I knew he was mad.

He was ''standing up'' with ''hands on hips''! Who's he think he is -- Carmen Miranda? Fortunately, before Bolton could let rip with a ''pursed lip'' or escalate to the lethal ''tsk-ing'' maneuver, Fingar was able to back cautiously out of the room and call the FBI anger management team, who surrounded the building and told the deranged diplomat to come out slowly with his hands above his hips.

Well, I haven't been so horrified since . . . well, since David Gest split from Liza Minnelli and launched a multimillion dollar suit for damages because she'd beaten him up. As ''The Daily Show's'' Jon Stewart observed, ''There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli.'' Likewise, whatever one's feelings about the U.N. and Kofi Annan and multilateralism, there's nothing that could get most self-respecting men to appear in front of a Senate committee and complain that Bolton put his hands on his hips. At least, Liza allegedly beat David to a pulp. True, she'd recently had two hip replacements, so if she'd slapped her hands on her hips, she'd have fallen to the ground howling in agony, and David could have run for his life. Or, indeed, strolled for his life, given that she was overweight, barely 5 feet tall and a decade his senior. But my point is: Even Gest might have balked at complaining about hands on hips.

...

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.''

...

If he doesn't get the nomination, he's got the makings of this summer's novelty hit, Neoconga No. 5:

''A little bit of fingering of my hips
A little bit of sneeriness on my lips
A little bit of rolling of both my eyes
A little bit of petulance in my sighs
A little bit of starting to almost mock
A little 'You so totally do not rock'
A little bit of memo on your desk
A little bit of you makes me Hulk-esque!''

And, if an underperforming bureaucrat winds up getting Atlanta or Dallas nuked, tough. Better that happen than that out-of-control nutcakes rampage around with hands on hips. After all, as National Review's John Derbyshire put it three years ago, deftly summing up the philosophy of this new war: Better dead than rude.

Wimpy analest (that is not a typo) who claim their boss was mean to them when he thought they put out bad work--that is what the Democrat party puts forth in a confirmation hearing. Thank you Barbara Boxer for giving Steyn such rich material.