Who writes this nonsense?

Somebody @ Bloomberg.com really needs to check the butts (and perhaps other body parts) of writers of their news stories for the White House's lipstick.

John Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations may face fresh obstacles in the Senate after the State Department said Bolton failed to tell lawmakers he was interviewed about faulty intelligence on Iraq.

State Department spokesman Noel Clay said yesterday that Bolton forgot about a 2003 interview by the department's inspector general, who was examining how the U.S. concluded Iraq tried to buy nuclear material from Niger, when he filled out a questionnaire for his Senate confirmation hearings.

Thirty-six senators, 35 Democrats and one Independent, sent a letter to President George W. Bush today urging him to withdraw the nomination and requesting that he not make a unilateral appointment, as permitted by the U.S. Constitution, when Congress takes a vacation break at the end of the week.

``Mr. Bolton's excuse that he `didn't recall being interviewed by the State Department's Inspector General' is simply not believable,'' the letter said.

The Bush administration needs to send an ambassador to the UN to push its agenda of changes designed to make the 60-year-old body more accountable and aligned with U.S. interests in areas like human rights, peacekeeping and democracy building.

Yes indeedy. It is awfully inconvenient the way the Luddites at the UN refuse to align with our new positions on these issues. But I'm not sure our new positions have been effectively summarized in one place before, so for the benefit of Kofi Annan and friends:

Human rights: Against
Peacekeeping: Against, at least until after the US has captured the local mineral rights
Democracy building: Happy to have it, so long as democracy means "puppet state"

Get with the program, folks. Else you will join the Geneva Conventions on our list of "quaint' institutions.

And the Gannonesque wholesale regurgitation of WH talking points reminds me of a case I read about once where a map company sued a copyright infringer so brazen that the infringer's maps included the copyright notices from the stolen maps.

You need to be slightly less obvious in your recycling, fools.