John Bolton with his White House memoir (cc photo: Gage Skidmore)
Opposing the current president is a worthy goal for anyone who wants a better world. But if that opposition is based on TV ratings and ad sales, then it is just as morally bankrupt as the president himself.
John Bolton’s new book, The Room Where It Happened, has earned him enormous amounts of free publicity for antagonizing the president. In their zeal to once again expose Trump as an all-around bad man, corporate media have elevated someone who should be condemned by a civilized society.
Bolton’s entire professional history should be enough to make him persona non grata in any respectable circles—from his work on the Buckley v. Vallejo case that legalized mega-spending on election campaigns (Intercept, 6/18/20), to his efforts in the Reagan administration to dismantle regulations on advertising baby formula in the Global South (USA Today, 4/24/05).
Bolton is most known for his hyper-militaristic foreign policy. During the George W. Bush years, he was one of the loudest cheerleaders for the murderous US invasion of Iraq, a war that has been responsible for as many as 3 million deaths (AlterNet, 3/15/18). He threatened international officials who got in his way, telling one, “We know where your kids live.” In order to sell the war to the public, he told outright lies to the public. Bolton has said that he has never regretted his support for the war.
After he joined the current administration as National Security advisor in 2018, Bolton spearheaded some of the Trump White House’s most aggressive foreign policies. In the spring of 2018, he encouraged a massive strike to “eliminate Syria’s air force” in response to alleged Syrian chemical weapon use (Vox, 4/16/18). He was also a driving force behind Trump’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) weapons treaty (Washington Post, 10/19/18).
Bolton was at the head of a massive campaign to delegitimize the government of Venezuela, part of the years-long American project of destroying Venezuela’s political stability through economic and public relations warfare (Time, 1/30/19). Washington’s economic sanctions killed an estimated 40,000 people in the country in 2017–18 alone (Independent, 4/26/19; CEPR, 4/19).
The New York Times (3/26/15) promoted Bolton’s call for an unprovoked attack on Iran to eliminate its nonexistent nuclear weapons program.
Bolton has also long been at the forefront of the neoconservative call for war with Iran. He has accepted tens of thousands of dollars from a group of Iranian exiles known as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), dedicated to overthrowing the current government; the group was officially designated by the US as a terrorist group from 1997 to 2012, due to a long record of bombing and assassination campaigns (Politico, 12/13/16). Eight months before joining the Trump administration, Bolton told the group that regime change in Iran should be the US’s stated policy, and that “before 2019, we will celebrate here in Tehran.”
In 2015, the New York Times (3/26/15) published Bolton’s opinion piece, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” In addition to failing to disclose Bolton’s ties with the MEK, the piece contained multiple factual errors (Intercept, 4/4/15). According to Jon Schwartz of the Intercept, the Times initially linked one of Bolton’s key claims to a source that contradicted the claim, only fixing it after Schwartz pointed it out.
Despite this long history of lying, and advocating a violent and aggressive foreign policy, Bolton’s latest project has been attacking the Trump administration for its gross incompetence and corruption. Media allowed Bolton to frame himself as a whistleblower trying to stop the lawlessness of an out-of-control Trump administration.
For the New York Times (6/21/20), Bolton’s main importance seemed to be his pertinence to the 2020 election.
Bolton’s central importance to corporate media is illustrated by a New York Times headline: “Trump Poses ‘Danger for the Republic’ if Re-Elected, John Bolton Charges” (6/21/20). Bolton’s usefulness as a club to bash Trump renders all of his past deeds beyond mention.
The Times (6/18/20) provided a summary of the main takeaways from Bolton’s book. One of the most prominent was that Bolton professes to substantiate key accusations from the House impeachment of Trump. This is not a surprising revelation; Bolton’s opposition to the administration’s efforts to force Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden was a major topic of discussion during the impeachment hearings. (For what it’s worth, Bolton also argues that impeachment was a political stunt rather than a serious inquiry, offering this as an explanation for why he didn’t testify about it at the time.) The rest of the book’s revelations center around the familiar narrative of Trumpian disregard for established norms and rules.
There has been debate about Bolton’s decision not to testify at the impeachment trial without a subpoena. According to CNN (6/17/20), Bolton “betrayed his country” by neglecting to blow the whistle on Trump and Ukraine earlier. Of course, there was no mention of Bolton’s history of leading (or trying to lead) the US into deadly wars.
These past several days, substantive policy issues were mostly drowned out by political gossip and pointing out the most obvious of Trump’s flaws. But on the few topics that Bolton has discussed, he feels that Trump hasn’t been hawkish enough.
In 2019, when Trump decided to call off a strike that could have killed 150 Iranians, Bolton felt this aversion to war was “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any president do” (despite the fact that a war with Iran could make Iraq look like a cakewalk). On Trump’s ongoing coup attempt in Venezuela, Bolton believed that Trump wasn’t sufficiently undermining the current elected Venezuelan government.
Last week Bolton had some of his highest visibility ever, with interviews all across the media. ABC News (6/21/20) had a much-hyped special, while USA Today (6/26/20) offered a similar interview. Several political cartoons have depicted Bolton as a significant challenge to Trump’s administration.
Stephen Colbert (Late Show, 6/23/20) laughing with John Bolton.
Late-night television personalities touted Bolton’s book. Bolton even appeared on CBS’s Late Show (6/23/20) with Stephen Colbert; the two ended up sharing laughs, much like Colbert had earlier rehabilitated Trump press secretary Sean Spicer (FAIR.org, 9/19/17). Mother Jones (6/24/20) called this interview “The Interview John Bolton Really Deserves,” because Colbert took the bold step of calling him “naive” for believing that Trump would follow the rules.
Bolton’s main contribution to the national discourse is exemplified by what he said to George Stephanopolos on ABC‘s Good Morning America (6/22/20):
[Trump’s] policymaking is so incoherent, so unfocused, so unstructured, so wrapped around his own personal political fortunes, that mistakes are being made that will have grave consequences for the national security of the United States.
Giving Bolton a platform to express his disdain for Trump also allows him to turn a realistic critique of Trump foreign policy on its head: Rather than being too violent and militaristic, the problem is that Trump is “incoherent” and “unfocused” in his violence and militarism.
Bolton also made appearances on the two main Sunday talk shows. Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press (6/28/20) asked Bolton whether or not Trump “is afraid to make Putin mad, because maybe Putin did help him win the election and he doesn’t want to make him mad for 2020?”
Bolton’s name is reaching peak levels of interest, according to Google Trends, and his book even made it to the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list. The book follows in a long line of anti-Trump insider White House accounts; Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Bod Woodward’s Fear and Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged each hit the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list.
In our pop culture world, Bolton, like many prominent public policymakers, is most importantly a celebrity. Sure, he may have had a troubled past, but that is a distant backstory to this current season. Regardless of his past disregard for human life, he is a new man, and has ridden the media wave into the halls of the anti-Trump #resistance.
Bolton’s ideas are dangerous to America and the rest of the world. Was rehabilitating the public image of a warmonger and elevating his voice really worth telling us, for the thousandth time, that Donald Trump runs the White House like a selfish child?
Of course, the corpress is peeved only when Killer Clown steps outside – or on – the carefully constructed status quo, as with his trade tirades.
When he furthers its objectives in affairs domestic and foreign, they break out the pom poms and declare him “presidential”.
Bolton can join the club of GOP ghouls that the #Resistance has rehabilitated into respectable commentators and members of society (based solely on their willingness to criticize Trump, and despite the fact that their own past crimes are certainly equal to Trump’s own).
So, get in line behind Bill Kristol, Nicole Wallace, David Frum, and the rest of the war criminals and liars now embraced by liberals and left-center media alike.
So, let me get this straight: because you don’t like the messenger, you think the message should not be believed. I say you’re wrong. Yes, Bolton is a despicable individual but that does not mean that what he’s relating should be dismissed.
That’s not what Mr. Greene said. Read the article.
Then, why isn’t the title, In the Name of the Truth, Media Elevates a Lying SOB?
Very interesting article, read it all. Do you think that enough people will read it, to get them to pass it on? Certainly hope so❗️❗️
Excellent article! As a long-time anti-war person (ie going back to the Vietnam War), I for one don’t like to see the former anti-war (at least in the 1970’s) liberal Dems continuing their slide to the war-mongering right by embracing a brittle hawk like Bolton — arguably the most hawkish of the high-profile politicians in this country. The next time this country has one of those bewildered “Why do they hate us?” moments, they can start the answer with assholes like John Bolton. As the author notes, he shouldn’t be a member of a rational, compassionate society, but I would more expect him to be on some downtown street corner yelling at passers-by about his paranoid world view. The last big politico with ugly views like his was Curtis Le May…
An article that starts with a comment “Opposing the current president is a worthy goal for anyone who wants a better world” is biased and not fair. Fair.org itself is pro-democratic party in general.
The John Bolton’s of the world and the rest of Trump’s entourage or cabal needs to be defined other than being labelled ghouls, assholes, etc… Because this seems to be a partisan democrate vs republican trend and behaviour which is more like a religion in the USA still waiting for democracy to arrive as sung by Leonard Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_P4IEr-yd8 . Could it be like James Hoopes writes in “False Prophets” page 8 that people who live in a consumer market environment become subservient to power mongers: “Dependence begets subservience and venality,suffocates the germ of virtue and prepares fit tools for the designs of(political) ambition?” Hence one accepts abuse to be part of an organization or to hold a job of any importance as those above being labelled. Walt Kelly once said: “We have seen the enemy. and he is us”. Also there is a saying: ” when one points a finger, there are also three pointed in one’s direction”. A population needs to understand how they participate in keeping power alive and oppressing them. People need to look in the mirror. The term asshole or ghoul is not an explanation of what is going on in the USA or in any other country . Slavoj Zizek says that “IDEOLOGY is the equivalent of eating garbage”. As a Québec sociologist wrote untranslated: “La partisanerie oblitère l’intelligence, lui fait perdre de sa lucidité et de sa perspicacité. Elle pose des œillères à ceux qui s’en nourrissent. Elle les mène à une vision plus étroite et racornie des êtres et des choses. Par elle, ils s’engagent dans un tunnel de plus en plus ténébreux où il devient pratiquement impossible de juger du mérite personnel des hommes et des femmes, d’estimer la valeur intrinsèque des projets de loi (ou autre) à discuter, des mesures politiques auxquelles souscrire. La partisanerie aliène l’esprit humain, elle le dépersonnalise”.-Jacques Lazure (Abolir les partis politiques).