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

Facts about Bolton enemies coming out

Powerline:

Last night I did a post about the latest attack on John Bolton, by a former State Department official named Frederick Vreeland. Vreeland embodies the failed anti-American and anti-Israel ideology that infected the State Department for a generation, but which, happily, is now in retreat as a result of the efforts of people like Bolton. A Google search this morning reveals that dozens if not hundreds of news outlets have repeated Vreeland's charges against Bolton, while, as far as I can tell, Vreeland's obvious political bias has been reported nowhere outside the blogosphere.

Meanwhile, Slublog notes that Vreeland was a member of, and financial contributor to, a group called "Diplomats & Commanders for Change," which opposed President Bush in November's election. The organization's mission statement says that its members "are deeply concerned by the damage the Bush Administration has caused to our national and international interests."

That's what this is about: the attack on Bolton is being orchestrated and carried out by the administration's political enemies, as part of their effort to subvert the President's foreign policy.

A new development, also, in the strange case of Melody Townsel, another anti-Bush activist who has come out of the woodwork to attack Bolton with a weird story about him chasing her down the corridor of a hotel in Russia because he was angry at her. Little Green Footballs notes that she has written her close friends at the Daily Kos to alert them to a history of plagiarism which she says will be used against her by Republicans. I haven't seen any sign of that yet, but it's certainly fair to say that if a Republican made an otherwise-unsupported charge against a Democrat, and turned out to have a documented history as a plagiarist, that fact would be considered relevant. What's more significant to me, though, is her close self-identification with the nutjobs at the Daily Kos.

It seems to me that Bolten has made all the right enemies. Someone who will stand up to the State Department bureaucrats who do not want to make the people who hate us angry cannot be that bad. Someone who questions the analysis of intelligence he is provided has an inquiring mind. Someone who speaks truth to despots ought to get a promotion not villification.