Posted by Frank James at 3:35 pm CDT
The Bush administration has sometimes criticized Capitol Hill for leaks. Today there was one more leak and it happened right before the eyes of John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
As Bolton testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of his confirmation hearings, water began dripping from the ceiling of the august hearing room.
(U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday, July 27, 2006. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.)“I’m not responsible for this, I might say, I’m not responsible for this” said Bolton who jokingly played off his reputation as one of the administration’s bad-boys.
It was the new and improved Bolton, more friendly and engaging than the old Bolton, whose reputed lack of people skills kept Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) from voting for him and giving him the necessary majority of votes to move his nomination out of committee last year.
That’s why President Bush used a recess appointment to get him to New York temporarily. Today’s hearing was a formality needed to make Bolton permanent, a foregone conclusion since Voinovich’s recent public declaration that he would now vote for the diplomat with the distinctive walrus mustache.
Bolton wasn’t responsible. It turns out a pipe had burst on the floor above.
It was a bit distracting at first. But an aide brought out one garbage pail, then another and placed them under the leak. “As long as we can keep the buckets coming we can proceed,” said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) who was temporarily chairing the committee.
Some minutes later, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) began posing a question about the administration’s budget requests for its UN operations when he said “I just felt something coming down on me. I’m going to scoot over here.”
“You can come over and sit with me, senator,” the new kinder and gentler Bolton said.
“Yeah, exactly,” said Obama who stayed at long table reserved for senators.
At the end of the hearing, Coleman said: “Ambassadors and diplomats have to operate in all sorts of environments, all sorts of conditions. You’ve done that through your career. You obviously demonstrated the capacity to do it today.”
