John Bolton, who fancies himself a presidential hopeful in 2024 for the GOP, was brought on the CBS Sunday show Face the Nation as the token conservative to bash Donald Trump from, ostensibly, the right.
The point of the exercise was clear straightaway, as the news actress in her first question dove right into the Stormy Daniels melodrama. This was Bolton’s response (emphases added):
I think it’s a big mistake politically for Republicans to [align with Trump]. And I think it’s important to stress that in this case that involves hush- hush money to a porn star to cover up an affair that later involves cooking his company’s books, you have not heard a single Trump defender stand up and say, oh, that’s not the Donald Trump I know. And it goes to the question of character and fitness for the presidency. I think that Trump’s obviously trying to attack the prosecutor and his supporters are following that…
…there is a kind of rough justice here, because it’s deeply ironic that a person who spent a good part of his four years in the White House trying to weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies is now saying he’s the victim of persecution. It’s sort of what comes around goes around, Mr. Trump.
The key question lingers in the background throughout any John Bolton interview: why is this person still granted the veil of authority as a source of political analysis?
The miscalculation on Bolton’s part, it appears, is that he has any traction with any voting base, Republican or otherwise. He has literally no popular support. The only way he maintains the veneer of relevance is through his frequent, fawning appearances on corporate media with news actors who never ask a tough question under penalty of law.
Polling would bear out, I predict, that a majority of the public — being largely disconnected from politics except for briefly and superficially for two-month periods in the fall every other year leading up to the November elections — has no idea who John Bolton is. The remainder of the public who do know who Bolton is are likely familiar with him solely for his failed Iraq War leadership as a major character, alongside the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, in the neoconservative, Project for a New American Century (PNAC) elite.
These people have been thoroughly rebuked by the American people, yet they somehow retain their status in the eyes of the corporate state. Dick Cheney’s daughter got annihilated in her primary despite nonstop fangirl propaganda from the corporate media to prop her up. George W. Bush’s sad brother, Low Energy Jeb, was unmanned by Trump in the 2016 primary. Max Boot, neocon think tank goon extraordinaire, is a human piñata for Tucker Carlson.
Everywhere in the public discourse, save for the most insular, elite echelons of elite corporate media like the Washington Post and MSNBC, the neocons have lost the debate.
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