It’s Dem desperation time as the Blue Party combs the known world for folks who remember the time that U.N. ambassador-nominee John Bolton looked cross-eyed at them a decade or so ago. The Other Charlotte posts today on the anti-Bolton letter from Frederick Vreeland, whose other claims to fame are that he’s the son of the late Vogue magazine editor Diana Vreeland and a guy who believes that the terrorist massacres of Sept. 11, 2001, were all America’s fault. (See TOC’s Why John Bolton Isn’t in Vogue today below.)
But the strangest anti-Boltonian yet to crawl out of the woodwork has got to be Lynne D. Finney. A onetime Carter Administration official who’s now a psychotherapist in Utah dabbling in “recovered memory” of past sexual abuse (a technique that’s now discredited as unreliable by most psychologists) and “spiritual techniques” of various kinds, Finney suddenly recovered a memory of Bolton’s having been mean to her some 23 years ago and reported it in a letter to Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., America’s wackiest U.S. senator.
According to the Washington Post, Finney said she was working in Washington in 1982 or 1983 as an attorney for USAID when Bolton ordered her to use her influence on U.N. officials to try to get the U.N.’s anti-infant formula regulations relaxed. (Effectively banning the bottle-feeding of babies is a longtime U.N. obsession that we’ve written about several times on this blog–see our Breast-Feeding Totalitarians, April 7, and the Mailbag for April 25.) Finney said she refused, according to the Post, at which point Bolton went…Bolton:
“Finney said Bolton tried to fire her. When it was deemed illegal, he retaliated by moving her to a ‘shabby windowless office in the basement’ to force her to quit, she said.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, no one at the State Department’s memory seemed to have been sufficiently recovered to recall this outrageous incident of Boltoniana–and Finney herself now declines to talk about it. Nonetheless, newspapers all over the country pulled long faces and reported it straight. What the reporters didn’t do, as the D.C. Examiner points out in an editorial today (thanks, Betsy’s Page, Lucianne, and Junkyard Blog, for the links), was to type “Lynne Finney” into Google.
What they would have found was one wild website! Does your taste run to rainbow-tinted pages? Multi-hued butterflies in the margin? Prose that reads like this?:
“Things are heating up. Like popcorn, we are all popping faster and are reaching enlightenment at a rapid rate. At times, it may be challenging to keep your faith and to realize that God/Love/Truth/Beauty/ Universe/Light/ Spirit/Energy/your true Self are in control and all is well. Go inside in silence and know that it is true. All the answers you need are inside you.
“You are spirit, energy, light, consciousness, a divine creation, powerful beyond imagining, perfect, and part of all that is.”
As is so often the case with New Age psycho-gurus, Finney makes it clear that the most effective way to find the “answers…inside you” is to buy some of her books and tapes. She writes:
“The most powerful technique I found for awakening to my true Self is the Self-inquiry technique I learned from Tibetan monks and Master Nome in Santa Cruz, California, a disciple of one of India’s most revered saints, Sri Ramana Maharshi. This Self-inquiry technique is part of my new CD, Connecting with the Universe – Meditations for enlightenment and Self-realization – and the entire CD track describing this technique and how to use it are recorded on the ‘New CD & New Book’ page of this web site. It is my gift to you. This technique changed my life. To listen, just click on the flashing butterflies and then scroll down to the Listening Room. My newspaper interview with Tibetan monks provides more information about the Self-inquiry technique and is on the ‘Articles’ page of this site.”
I dunno about those Tibetan monks who got dragooned into the Finney enlightenment enterprise, but I did google Master Nome. Seems that Nome, whose ran his Santa Cruz guru-biz until recently in partnership with his brother Russell, gets only a one-stupa (out of a possible five) “suspect” rating from Sarlo’s Guru Rating Service, a Michelin Guide for seekers of self-realization. Sarlo includes this report from a disgruntled former Nome-dome:
“[W]hen the organization was in full swing, they had a community manager and tended to run things very tightly controlled: applications, minimum required tithing, various group pressure activities to keep folks in line. Russell could be quite the tyrant at board meetings and a bit paranoid, lots of yelling, acting out, throwing or threatening to throw community members out if they didn’t toe the company line.”
Hmm, sounds like…John Bolton! Maybe he also spent a stint at the feet of Master Nome.
As the D.C. Examiner editorial puts it:
“The problem for Democrats is that most Americans agree with Bolton. The United Nations is a corrupt dictators club badly in need of reform. The scandals of oil-for-food and sexual abuse have tarnished an image already suffering from inaction in Iraq, Rwanda and Darfur.
“So since Democrats can’t fight about the U.N., they have to debate something else. That leaves only Bolton’s character as a lever to keep him out of the United Nations and deal a blow to the Bush Administration’s aggressive foreign policy.
“That’s pathetic. Barbara Boxer needs to explain her role in fomenting this farce. But as a Washington partisan, these games are par for the course for people like Boxer. The reporters who put their skepticism under a hat and failed to ask basic questions need to tell us why anyone should trust their reporting again.”
I’ll end with this web-thought from Lynne Finney herself:
“A golden eagle
flies free above the rainbow,
cradled in Love’s light.”
Right up there with those flashing butterflies.