If any shady Broadway impresario (think: Max Bialostock) ever has the cajones to mount a production similar to Springtime for Hitler for the 8 years of the Bush administration, there will never be a more perfect creep who truly personifies BushCo than John Bolton. That Bolton could not be confirmed by the U.S. Senate as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, despite repeated attempts and even with a solid Republican congress in place, tells you all that you need to know about his credentials. Without question, John Bolton is the poster boy for everything that is wrong with or went wrong during the Bush administration’s reign of terror.

Today, the Los Angeles Times actually provides Mr. Bolton with a few precious op-ed column inches to attack Barack Obama’s speech yesterday in Berlin. I’m not going to critique the entire column. It’s almost a self-parody. But the following paragraph really rubbed me the wrong way:

Tearing down the Berlin Wall was possible because one side — our side — defeated the other. Differences in levels of economic development, or the treatment of racial, immigration or religious questions, are not susceptible to the same analysis or solution. Even more basically, challenges to our very civilization, as the Cold War surely was, are not overcome by naively “tearing down walls” with our adversaries.

Sometimes, it’s fun to watch the right wing morons (and Bolton is on the far fringes of the moron brigade) implode and try to rewrite history. In this case, he’s implying that the U.S. defeated the Soviet Union in the cold war. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The U.S.S.R. defeated itself by sinking its national treasury into a black hole of corruption, unsustainable imperialism outside its geographic sphere of influence, and a military buildup unparalleled in history. Essentially, the Soviet Union (under Gorbachev) decided that East and West German reconciliation was inevitable, and that there was no reason to further continue sinking limited national resources into a failed project. Ronald Reagan didn’t tear down the Berlin wall, despite what Bolton (and the GOP’s) rewrite of history would tell you. The U.S.S.R. abandoned it.

As you read little Johnny Bolton’s screed in the L.A. Times today, consider that the Times ran it on a Saturday - typically the least read newspaper day of the week - and consider it accordingly. What’s even funnier is that there’s no question that the last person that Bolton would actually support in the upcoming election is John McCain (who was an opponent of Bolton’s in the Senate).

Fun stuff.