I write in defense of poor John Bolton.

OK, not in defense of Bolton, but in defense of President Bush’s nomination of Bolton to be the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations. After a set of initial hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the nomination is in trouble, the confirmation process stalled.

Co-workers at the State Department, Bolton’s current place of employment, have sniped about his obnoxious conduct. People who encountered him years ago in private industry have complained about his abusive temper. Democrats charge that his abrasiveness makes him ill-suited to be America’s chief representative to the community of nations. And Republican support for him on the Senate committee has grown squishy enough to force postponement of a vote.

I gladly stipulate the impossibility of defending Bolton’s approach to interpersonal relationships. He browbeats people below him in the pecking order, sucks up to those above him and tries to intimidate anyone in between who disagrees with him or otherwise stands in his way. There’s not a soul reading these words who hasn’t worked with – more typically, worked for – someone like this. Drive-through psychology tells us bullies abuse others to mask feelings of inferiority (often richly deserved), but that doesn’t make enduring the abuse any easier.

Even so, the Democrats’ efforts to convert these first-person accounts into disqualifications for the U.N. job amount to whining: What, Bolton’s too mean to make nice with the French ambassador?

And while Bolton’s reckless rhetoric has earned him international condemnation as “human scum,” “a beastly man bereft of reason” and, just last week, “a rude, erratic and violent person,” the offended nations in these instances were North Korea and Iran. Is this really the company Democrats want to keep?

Republicans’ qualms about unleashing Bolton at the United Nations, meanwhile, don’t come off any better. Their biggest gun, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, has tried to undermine the nomination without seeming to. Powell took phone calls from a couple of Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee last week and reportedly spoke candidly about Bolton’s shortcomings. Powell’s former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, told the New York Times on the record that Bolton “is incapable of listening to people and taking into account their views. He would be an abysmal ambassador.”

Excuse me, but after letting the Bush administration play him for a patsy for four years and not resigning in protest, it’s a little late for Powell to try to reclaim his role as a stand-up guy, especially through stealth and the use of surrogates. Besides, if Bolton – who, after all, worked as one of Powell’s undersecretaries of state – was so unpleasant and objectionable, why didn’t Powell just fire him? He didn’t because Bolton is essentially a capo regime in the Dick Cheney neo-con family and, thus, under the protection of the godfatherly vice president.

Last week, Bush called Bolton “the right man at the right time for this important assignment.” The assignment is to embody the administration’s fundamental attitude toward the United Nations: contempt. At this, Bolton has no peer. His career has been a litany of disdain for international cooperation, unless “cooperation” meant other countries doing what the United States told them to do. He has scorned the International Criminal Court, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, improvements in the international protocols against biological weapons and the institution of the United Nations itself.

Let’s speak plainly: If Bush wanted a respected internationalist representing America at the United Nations, he would have found a way to keep Missouri Republican John Danforth in the job. Yes, Danforth cited only personal reasons for resigning after a scant seven months as Bush’s ambassador. But with his courageous rebuke last month of the Republican Party for becoming “the political extension of a religious movement,” Danforth left little doubt of his ideological estrangement from the leader of that party: the president of the United States.

Clearly, Bolton would better serve Bush’s anti-internationalist agenda – and without any fussy pretenses to the contrary.

Finally, there’s simple pragmatism. As undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Bolton undercut Powell in his dealings with Iran, came close to derailing scheduled U.S. talks with North Korea about its nuclear program and left Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice, unprepared for criticism she got earlier this year on her first trip to Europe as secretary of state. As U.N. ambassador, Bolton might very well do less damage to American interests than he can – and has – in his current job.

In that sense, moving Bolton to the United Nations can be seen as a demotion, albeit a demotion with honor due to Cheney’s sponsorship. That makes opposition to his nomination the wrong fight at the wrong time over the wrong job.