News leaked Thursday afternoon that President Trump is firing his national security adviser, Gen. H. R. McMaster, and will replace him with John Bolton, an abrasive hardcore rightwinger loathed as a warmonger by liberals. Bolton was a principal architect of George W. Bush’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Just a couple weeks ago Trump dismissed reports that McMaster was leaving as “fake news” and said he was “doing a great job.” His departure marks another in a series of White House personnel changes replacing moderates with extremists.
A CNN op-ed piece describes Bolton as “worse than Michael Flynn” and “one of America’s most hawkish and ineffective diplomats for decades … an architect of the Iraq War, an enemy of multilateralism and foe of the United Nations, where he served during the George W. Bush administration through a recess appointment when he could not win Senate confirmation … a harsh critic of the Iran nuclear deal and of North Korea, and is seen as someone who might promote conflict in both cases.” (Read the op-ed here.)
Bolton is a militarist, and his selection signals that Trump prefers military over diplomatic solutions to such knotty issues as North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear weapons programs. Unfortunately, the NSA job isn’t subject to Senate confirmation, so Democrats won’t get to filibuster Bolton’s appointment this time, as they did in 2005 when Bush installed him as U.N. Ambassador, a diplomatic post Bolton doesn’t believe in.
If you have a 1950s fallout shelter in your backyard, maybe you should clean it out, and stock it with food and water … just in case.