Bolton on Bush vs. Bureaucracy
I missed former U.N. ambassador John Bolton's appearance on the Daily Show this week, but caught up with it on their Web site. You've got to give him credit for walking into the lion's den and facing some tough questions and a hostile audience. Bolton, not surprisingly, took a hard line on how the executive branch should be run. Some excerpts from his remarks:
It is not the case that the government should be staffed by people who like the bureaucracies they're serving in. ... The president ought to have people philosophically attuned to his way of thinking, and if you've got a problem with that, I would say you've got a problem with democratic theory. ...The whole point of electing a president to preside over the executive branch is to give the people a choice on the direction the entire executive branch is going, and you can't pick it apart -- and I think that's what some in Congress are trying to do, to make it impossible for the president to run the administration. That's what a president is for under the Constitution. ...
When the bureaucracy fights against the elected president's policies ... the way it should work is that people follow the policies as long as they're lawful, and part of the president's problem in Washington is fighting against permanent bureaucracies that have a very different point of view than his.
(Thanks to D.P. for the tip on this one.)