Two stories. First from The Wall Street Journal:
Bolton to Back Romney
Former U.N Ambassador John Bolton is set to endorse Mitt Romney and will join his top team of foreign-policy advisers, according to people close to the campaign....
The Bolton endorsement will help buttress Mr. Romney's image as the more hawkish of the GOP candidates....
Then from ThinkProgress:
Former Bush administration ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton said today on Fox News that the killing of an Iranian scientist and sanctions against Iran constitute only "half-measures" in the quest to stunt Iran's nuclear ambitions....
Openly contemptuous of international law and a longtime proponent of war with Iran, Bolton's only objection to the killing of Iranian scientists seems to be that it's not enough for him:
BOLTON: ... I think, honestly, that half-measures like assassinations or sanctions are only going to produce the crisis more quickly. The better way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons is to attack its nuclear weapons program directly, break their control over the nuclear fuel cycle.
I bring this up because the complete, exhaustive list of people who can be elected president in November contains only two names: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
If you are hell-bent on turning Barack Obama into a foreign-policy Antichrist, and on declaring that any progressive who doesn't regard him as a war criminal is a traitor to left values and human decency -- well, this is the alternative. The only alternative. Not Ron Paul. Not Gary Johnson. This.
Our moral betters -- Glenn Greenwald and others -- are making it their life's work to persuade as many progressives as possible to loathe Barack Obama and regard him as indistinguishable from Republicans on every issue. But every Republican president we've elected in my lifetime has upped the ante on previous Republican presidents' awfulness.* My rule of thumb is: The worst president in American history is always the next Republican president.
Would President Romney really be worse on foreign policy than George W. Bush? Stay home in November, or vote libertarian the way you may have voted Nader in 2000, and we all may get to find out.
*With the exception, I guess, of George H.W. Bush, though even he got us into two wars.
