John Bolton -- A Fox Quits the Henhouse

Dec. 6, 2006 — -- Appointing John Bolton to be America's ambassador to the United Nations was the political equivalent of hiring the Marlboro Man to run the nation's stop-smoking programs.

When President Bush was looking for an appointee for the U.N. job, it's hard to imagine him coming up with a worse choice than Bolton.

At the time, Bolton was undersecretary of state for arms control -- his qualifications for promotion included getting himself kicked out of the negotiations about Libya's weapons programs; personally hamstringing efforts to lock up loose nuclear material in Russia; and, of course, his famous argument that "there is no United Nations."

That argument from Bolton led me to hope that if he got the U.N. job, he might surprise us all by just never showing up for work.

Sadly, my hopes were wrong.

Bolton did show up for work at the United Nations, an institution he had made a career out of deriding and undermining.

As ambassador, he blew off the U.N. Security Council mission to Sudan. He botched the U.S. position on the Millennium Development Goals. He said that China should get a permanent seat on the Human Rights Council.

China? Human rights? Really?

That brilliant Bolton idea contradicted the official position of our government, and the State Department had to scramble to overrule him.

Last month, The Economist magazine quoted an unnamed senior Western diplomat saying, "If Bolton left tomorrow, progress would be possible on almost every front where it is now stalled. … He has succeeded in putting almost everyone's backs up, even among some of America's closest allies. His main achievement has been to break the unified coalition of the North and unify the previously fragmented South."

In other words, John Bolton has been a disaster as U.N. ambassador.

Not exactly a surprise, I know.

John Bolton's pre-U.N. career telegraphed exactly how bad he would be at the job. The important question to ask is not why John Bolton was so bad as U.N. ambassador; the question to ask is why was he given the job in the first place.

Rachel Maddow is the host of "The Rachel Maddow Show," which airs nationwide on Air America Radio affiliate stations from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. ET.