WASHINGTON – President George W. Bush was forced to deny again yesterday that John Bolton, his Mephistophelean nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, is, in fact, the Antichrist.
“Mr. Bolton’s mustache may intimidate women and frighten children,” Bush said in a prepared statement, “but that does not make him the Antichrist. I can insure you that. In fact, his moustache and, uh, certain maybe erratic things that he, uh, which he, uh, might or might not have done in the past do not necessarily make him anti-UN or, on the other hand, unfit to serve in the UN. I am George W. Bush and I still approve this nomination.”
Bush’s statement came after Senate Republicans could not muster the votes needed to end the Democratic filibuster, which has Bolton’s nomination blocked like a toilet in a one-pump gas station on old Route 66 in New Mexico. The Republican-run Senate fell six votes short (54-38) of the sixty votes needed to end the filibuster that has prevented a roll call confirming the mustache-wielding conservative.
That President Bush was obliged to deny for a second time that Bolton is the Antichrist is proof, say many Washington insiders, that Democrats have finally learned to play the evangelical card after years of being sliced to ribbons by it in elections and in the court of public opinion. To be sure, no card in the stacked evangelical deck is more potent than the Antichrist of Trumps, which ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph R. Biden (D-MBNA.), played during committee hearings in April.
“Is it getting cold in here or is it me,” said Biden, staring pointedly at Bolton when he appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee. “Have you ever noticed how people always turn their collars up whenever Mr. Bolton enters a room?” Biden asked his fellow senators at the nomination hearing.
Biden used his oratorical skills, which often earn him flattering comparisons to retired Welsh politician Neil Kinnock, to mock and belittle Bolton, who once said the United Nations was “about as useful as teats on a bull moose.” Toward the end of one afternoon Biden asked Bolton, “Could you swivel your head around, John, and check the time on the clock at the back of the room? And wipe that green stuff off your tie.”
For all of Biden’s sophisticated wizardry, the gravest charges against Bolton were hurled in a question-and-answer session that followed the day’s hearings. In that session Senator John F. Kerry (D-KINKO) told reporters that Bolton’s conduct is “eerily reminiscent of the predictions contained in St. John’s gospels regarding the emergence of the Antichrist.”
“For he will cometh in a time of upheaval and rising energy prices,” said Kerry, reading from a Bible. “And he will abuseth power, firing subordinates who disagree with him and bearing false witness against women who question his behavior. What’s more, his satanic appearance will frighten little children, and he will kick his dog in public.”
The White House was quick to charge that Democrats were using religion as “a scare tactic in a brazen attempt to frighten committee members into voting against the Bolton nomination.” Yet for all the Republicans’ accusations, the Antichrist card appears to be working. In a previous vote on Bolton’s nomination, taken on May 26, Republicans were only two votes short of ending the filibuster. This time they were six short.
Following yesterday’s setback in the Senate, White House spokesman Scott McClellan hinted that President Bush still holds the upper hand in the high-stakes Bolton game.
“While we continue to urge the Senate to give Mr. Bolton the courtesy of an up-or-down vote on the floor,” said McClellan, “we have not ruled out the possibility that President Bush will play the I-am-the-Christ card.”
That card, explained McClellan, is the recess appointment, a constitutional prerogative that allows the president to change the score, at least temporarily, of a nomination vote that does not go his way. Therefore, said McClellan, the president could appoint Bolton during Congress’ July 4 recess. That appointment would last until the end of Congress’ next session—January 2007.
Although McClellan would not say for sure whether President Bush would make a recess appointment, he did announce that the White House was holding “a little Independence Day barbeque,” and he extended an invitation to all reporters “who might be looking for an interesting story on a slow news day.”
In related news, a source close to a Washington, D.C., bakery that does a lot of work for the White House confirmed yesterday that it had received an order for several cakes in the shape of the U.N. building with the top ten stories missing.
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