What a mess! Sen. Joe Biden, who did a masterful job orchestrating the smear on Bork way back when, is doing it again. He has wrested control over this committee from its chairman.
Voinovich is uncomfortable voting. Why? Because he hasn't attended any of the meetings, says he, and isn't up to speed. I can't believe his fellow senators let him get away with this. Then, Chafee jumps on this as though Voinovich has presented some new insight into the process.
The result is that Biden, Boxer, et. al. have more time to cut propagandist tapes and find whiny State Department employees to complain that Bolton once raised his voice.
Addition:
National Review Online Editorial: "In the key allegation against Bolton, he is said to have intimidated a State Department intelligence analyst who objected to Bolton's supposedly too-dire assessment of Cuba's bioweapons program. But Bolton aide Fred Fleitz has testified that the analyst in question, Christian Westerman, wasn't straight with Bolton or his staff — giving Bolton plenty of reason to be upset. At issue was language in a speech Bolton was to deliver about Cuba. It was Westerman's responsibility to run the proposed language by the CIA, but when he did so he attached his own prejudicial language dissenting from Bolton's views. When Fleitz learned this, Westerman falsely denied having done it, leading to the infamous confrontation in Bolton's office. Two of Westerman's supervisors subsequently apologized for how he handled the matter. That Bolton is now the one being pilloried for this spat — Sen. Chris Dodd said his conduct should be 'indictable' — is absurd. In any case, as Lugar pointed out in a statement earlier this week, in an environment characterized by contentious policy disputes — as Bush's foreign policy team was in the first term — you can expect some personal contention."
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