It’s too bad that President Bush had to use the recess appointment to send to the United Nations an ambassador who sees the need to reform that organization.


As the Freedom Alliance notes:


“John Bolton deserved an up or down vote in the United States Senate, something Democrats, who are beholden to Kofi Annan, refused to give him. Given the lack of political integrity on Capitol Hill, the President did the right thing in making this recess appointment.


“While the Left has obstructed the appointment of Bolton as UN Ambassador, more corruption has surfaced in the Oil-for-Food scandal; Kofi Annan has been playing footsies with Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe; there has been no accountability in peacekeeping scandals; and reminiscent of FDR, Kofi Annan is trying to neutralize the United States by packing the Security Council.”


Needless to say, Democrats pitched a hissy fit about the recess option, with their Senate leader Harry Reid saying that such an appointment means Bolton arrives at the U. N. “with a cloud hanging over his head.”


This is nonsense. As Wes Pruden of the Washington Times observes today:


“No American ambassador arrives at any appointment anywhere with a cloud hanging over his head; the representative of the president of the United States makes his own weather. The notion — peddled by the Democrats, who knew they could delay the appointment only for a little while — that Mr. Bolton arrives in New York with ’built-in handicaps’ and ’starts out as a lame duck’ without ‘the stature that comes with Senate approval,’ is merely media huffing and partisan puffing.


“In an editorial, the Associated Press called the appointment ’brazen’ and an ’in-your-face gesture to Congress and the global community,’ but the only puzzlement at the U.N. is over why the president allowed a tiny minority of senators, resigned to a self-assigned and probably semi-permanent role as knockers and grumblers, to frustrate policy aims with procedural delaying tactics.”