Pardon my inexperience with this site, but I have beem a columnist for six years and I am still trying to figure out where the "introduction" is, and why this system does not consider John Bolton a valid topic. This is my fifth attempt to submit the following column.
I learned an important lesson this April. Spring is not a season. It's a reality check. After two weeks of hot days and balmy nights I surrendered to temptation. I dug and turned the earth, seeking to create a living sculpture - a grape arbor. Then I spent the last weekend of the month dogging snow flakes while trying to save my newly planted grapes from becoming freeze dried sticks. The solution to this intolerable situation is obvious. We need John C. Bolton at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Mr. Bolton is the mustache President Bush has nominated for the post of Ambassador to the United Nations. He called him the "...the right man at the right time for the right job."
But any average neo-con with a stunted sense of socialization could bully respected international leaders in public. But only John Bolton has that rare blend of experience and temperament that Agriculture desperately needs - an ideologue bureaucrat with a short fuse and a history of using it.
Mr. Bolton has been described as a "kiss up- kick down sort of boss" and we've all worked for managers like that. But he's much more than that. He isn't an irrational jerk merely by inclination. His record speaks of a man who has so honed his abuse of underlings that if they gave out Oscars for bullying, he'd be Bette Davis.
How big a jerk is he? According to Newsweek Magazine the British, just about the only government left on the face of the earth still taking our calls, had to request that Mr. Bolton be removed from a team negotiating with Libya because he was "...making it impossible to reach a treaty." It has been alleged that when an intelligence analyst refused to back up Bolton's claim that Cuba had a biological weapons program -Cuba?- Bolton went postal, screamed at him and threatened to fire him. A women who worked for Bolton at the U.S. Agency for International Development says that when she crossed him up Bolton screamed at her and tried to fire her, too. When he found out he couldn't do that he had her transferred to a windowless office in the basement. Can you see some geek meteorologist trying to slip an April snowstorm past this guy?
Seven states got hit with the white stuff - Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and at least that part of Indiana enclosed by my backyard fence. Detroit suburbs got 13 inches of snow. 80,000 folks around Cleveland lost electrical power. Of course, I don't live in Cleveland or Detroit so what do I care? I live in Indiana and I care about my grapes.
Luckily my wife had planted the tomatoes in pots so we just brought those inside. But my poor little grapes, which had just sent their first fragile tendrils reaching out in search of trellises, were stuck in the cold, cold ground. All we could offer against the frost was a tent made out of plastic trash bags. But when I removed those bags would I find stunted lifeless twigs stuck in the ground or vibrant living things that just look like lifeless twigs stuck in the ground?
John Bolton wouldn't surrender the agri-cultural wars. He wouldn't tolerate activist agronomists or liberal biased botanists. If my grapes were threatened, if my tomatoes were frightened, John Bolton would at least threaten to fire somebody.
He's the right man at the right time of year for the right job.
Merry Spring, Mr. Bolton. Hoe, hoe, hoe.