Morning Update

Some information for you this morning.

First, Robert Novak details the ridiculous Bolton-nomination operation in the Senate and White House and shows how weak the Republicans are for caving in to Sen. Chris Dodd's game of hardball. Dodd has an uncanny ability to be on the wrong side of history: he is pro-Castro, pro-Chavez, was pro-Sandinista and pro-El Salvadoran commies. He hates Bolton and Bolton's friend and ally Otto Reich for their anticommunist stances during the 1980s, especially viz. Latin American communist dictatorships (Nicaragua, Cuba) and commie insurgents (El Salvador). He prevented Reich's nomination for an asst. secretary of state position from coming to the Senate floor in 2001. Yet his whining and crying about the BS allegations of Melody Townsell have had an effect by forcing George Voinovich to leave his cajones back in Ohio.

Mark Steyn's take on this is great:

Britain's Daily Telegraph had an intriguing headline the other day: ''U.S. police force to recruit capuchin monkey for 'intelligence' work.'' Maybe when the Mesa, Ariz., SWAT team is through with the monkey in question, we could get him made chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He'd have his work cut out doing a worse job than Dick Lugar, the Republican senator who spent the last week getting walloped by a freak show alliance comprising (a) an opposition party whose foreign policy the electorate decided it was unable to take seriously and (b) jelly-spined GOP ''moderates'' who insist on taking it seriously.

Next, the inestimable Andy McCarthy discusses how the objections to the Bolton nomination say a lot more about the weakness of our intelligence bureaucracy than the Bolton candidacy itself:

Public service — at least when it's being done right — involves a lot of debating and disputing, sometimes with people one doesn't necessarily like personally, sometimes with those one admires but believes to be profoundly wrong on some issue or another. When the stakes are high, as they are in national security, disagreements can get downright heated . . . Bill Clinton, reputed to have a meteoric temper, was once reported to have snapped at HUD Secretary Donna Shalala for criticizing his indiscretions, [and] another media favorite, Senator John McCain, snapped at Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during hearings on the Abu Ghraib scandal.

On another issue, George Will says the younger generation treats print media like Oldsmobiles: something for old people.

In an essay on the British welfare state, Theodore Dalrymple shows how British collectivism was an increasingly popular theory before World War II and how current British socialism (read: the NHS) is a misbegotten legacy of the collectivist necessities engendered by the war. Speaking of a misbegotten socialist remnant, in the same issue of City Journal that Dalrymple's essay appears, you'll also find Nicole Gelinas' prescription for fixing the taxpayer sinkhole that is the NYC transit system.

And finally for now, a tragedy in Japan: a train derailment that killed more than 50 people and injured more than 400.