Possible Project

If I had more time on my hands I'd look up what people who are praising former National Security Advisor John Bolton said about him when he was the US Ambassador to the United Nations during George W. Bush's administration. Bolton's about to publish a book, which I was probably not going to read even before I learned it's almost 600 pages long. In it, he says that President Trump doesn't know what he's talking about on foreign policy and makes a lot of it up as he goes along. I already know those things and don't care to spend $30 for someone else to tell me.

My curiosity comes from the fact that during the Bush administration, Bolton was among the officials who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was roundly denounced for believing the erroneous intelligence reports that said so. I suspect the round denouncers are now pretty pleased to lap up every critical word Bolton aims at the president.

White House memoirs all boil down to the same thing: "If only those fools had listened to me!" Excerpts and reporting on Bolton's book suggest he's done exactly that regarding his time in the Trump administration, which puts him on a level with Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth. There's an aspiration without parallel.

In any event, the one-note theme of these memoirs almost never answers the question that I think should be asked of the memoirists: If you were so smart you had all the answers while everyone around you was a dolt, why did you go work for the dolt in the first place?