John Bolton — His Dangerous Fantasies

The idea of a weakling like John Bolton dying for his country in the paddy fields of Vietnam back in 1960s and 70s would be laughable, if it weren’t for the death and destruction this miserable, little coward has wreaked throughout the world since then. But, to his eternal shame, Bolton hangs on to the idea he might’ve been valiant hero prepared to die for his country, were it not for someone else deciding his fate, of course. Not that a pompous little pipsqueak like Bolton is capable of feeling shame or remorse. To quote directly from his Wikipedia entry: 

“He wrote in his Yale 25th reunion book: ‘I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.” In a 2007 interview, Bolton explained his comment in the reunion book saying his decision to avoid service in Vietnam was because “by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from.” 

In this case it was the fault of that bastard Teddy Kennedy that he didn’t win a chest full of medals for his brave exploits on the battlefied. Bolton spins a cock and bull story to justify the unjustifiable that his sacrifice would have been in vain should Kennedy have become president at some indeterminate point in the future. And that’s the real reason why he didn’t go to war for his country. Truth is he was raring to go! Let’s get back down to Earth for a moment. For a start, the self-serving fantasy that someone as effete as penpusher Bolton would be sent to the front line is hillarious. 

In 1970 no sane person would ever have expected Edward “Teddy” Kennedy to run for president in the forseeable future, let alone reach the White House. And for one reason only, Chappaquiddick. 

On July 18th 1969 Teddy Kennedy and 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne were driving away from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, when the car they were in careered off a small bridge and into the water below. Kennedy was at the wheel. While he managed to escape through a car window, Mary Jo Kopechne drowned. The news spread around the world like wildfire. Kennedy seemed at a loss to explain how it had happened. That wasn’t helped by the number of awkward questions that followed, most of which he failed to answer convincingly. First, what was a married man doing driving a young woman round late at night? Secondly, why did he wait ten hours to report the incident, or explain that Mary Kopechne was still in the car? Among the answers he gave, Kennedy claimed that, after swimming to shore, he made several efforts to get back in the water to rescue Kopechne, who was later found to have died from drowning.  It was to haunt Kennedy for the rest of his life. The idea that Chappaquiddick might have slipped Bolton’s mind just a year later is beyond belief, it’s preposterous. The scandal was still selling newspapers in 1970. It even makes money today. In 1980 it was the key thing that lost Kennedy the nomination. Bolton just weaves another egregious lie into his sickening web of lies. 

Almost three decades later, in his eagerness to appear even smarter, at the same time as exploiting the opportunity to take yet another swipe at the Kennedys, Bolton shuffled the historical truth deck to show just how smart he is when claiming he had no great interest in going Vietnam because Teddy Kennedy might give it back to the people Bolton might’ve died in taking it away from. There’s a lot of ‘mights’ and ‘maybes’ in Bolton’s account of history. Basically, this is a sociopath’s idea of humor. It may raise a snort and snigger with his fellow war criminals, who also dodged serving their country in time of war (Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and Elliot Abrams) but it won’t for the war vets and the families of the victims of Vietnam. 

In the manner of a typical sociopath, Bolton constantly dishonors and disrespects all those who lost their lives in the faraway rice paddies of Vietnam, without so much as a blink. His pathological insensitivity towards others leads him to insult the intelligence of their families and friends by implying he was a lot smarter than them by avoiding the draft. We are expected to admire his cleverness in escaping the terrible fate that actually did cost 58,220 American servicemen their lives. They did die in the “rice paddies” of Vietnam. With his crass bragging he insults all Americans, especially the veterans who survived. He’s an unapologetic narcissist, someone who places himself above the rest of us. 

Nearly half a century later Bolton is slavering at the bit to send thousands of other young Americans to die in foreign nations he deems vassals of the empire, in his eyes, he is destined to run. And that means the entire planet. This time he wants tens of thousands of Europeans to die for his madness too. As long as they are killing hundreds of thousands of brown people he will be happy. And I really mean happy. 

Bolton and his puny crew of madmen must be halted before they plunge the world into nuclear conflict. Pity we have to look towards that other draft dodger, Trump, to do it. There is little doubt in my mind that the world would be a far better place if men like these had died in the rice fields of Vietnam.