Mr. Soul

So we limp into Christmas morning fairly sure that, with less than a week left in the year, things can’t get no worse. We think we’ve heard from every sad and tragic situation from everywhere on earth and we’re mentally ready, at least, to hunker down, burrow in, hibernate in winter’s fog until the new year. And then we turn on the TV first thing to find out what went down while we were sleeping. And we find out what went down while we were sleeping.

Early that morning at Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, James Brown, JB, Mr. Dynamite, Soul Brother Number One, Godfather of Soul, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, the Original Disco Man and the King of Funk, gave up the ghost, passing from this world to the next, dying of congestive heart failure complicated by pneumonia, at the age of 73.

When we lose any portion of the double helix of the American songbook – George Gershwin, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles – whatever’s left is diminished, less powerful, less passionate. It goes without saying that we’re poorer this Christmas than we were before.

It might go without saying, but some people – those who knew him as friend and confidant – found ways to say it. “He was an innovator, he was an emancipator, he was an originator. Rap music, all that stuff came from James Brown,” Little Richard, a longtime friend, told MSNBC.

“James Brown changed music,” said Rev. Al Sharpton, another longtime friend and one who toured with him in the 1970s. “He made soul music a world music,” said Sharpton, one of the few black men in America with nerve enough to pull off wearing a pompadour today. “What James Brown was to music in terms of soul and hip-hop, rap, all of that, is what Bach was to classical music. This is a guy who literally changed the music industry. He put everybody on a different beat, a different style of music. He pioneered it.”

Generations were inspired by him; legions of rock & soul’s best talents copped his moves and attitude. JB was the template, the wellspring of funk from which everything flowed. From Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson, from Prince to the rappers and hiphop artists who sampled his signature shouts and shrieks – everyone stole from James Brown whether they knew it or not.

Want proof? Get a copy of the 1964 TAMI Show. In that concert, James Brown and the Famous Flames were the evening’s penultimate act; the embryonic version of the Rolling Stones were to close the show. But James & crew quite simply tore the stage up, JB doing his best dance moves as he fronted a furiously tight band, the perpetual motion machine bringing the crowd to near frenzy, ankles and hips swiveling at angles we had thought were anatomically impossible.

When Jagger and the Stones took the stage, Mick aped James’ best dance moves, doing his 22-year-old best but showing in his British white-boy style why imitation is the most sincere form of flattery (and that night the most hilarious, too).

Some of James Brown’s music dovetailed perfectly with a rising sense of black consciousness. The 1968 song “(Say It Loud) I’m Black and I’m Proud” was embraced by young black America in a time when outwardly assertive black pride was still a nascent phenomenon. James never shied away from his role as a race man, one of the major brothers on the scene no matter when the scene was.

“I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,” Brown told The Associated Press in 2003. “The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society.”

JB may have been a bit hyperbolic about all that. The move away from “Negro” and “colored” toward “black” was already well underway – had been for almost a year. In 1967 Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and others on the activist left had started the Black Power movement, coining a phrase that galvanized, though some will say divided, the civil rights movement. But James’ song became an anthem, taking the notion of forthright black pride from the college campuses and the grip of the intellectuals and putting it where it needed to be to really resonate: on the radio. This was social change you could dance to.

From the beginning, James Brown was a brother we could understand. James was folks, he was one of us from jump street. Born poor in Barnwell, S.C., in 1933, he was abandoned at the age of four to the care of relatives and friends. James grew up on the streets of Augusta, Ga., getting by every way he could: picking cotton, shining shoes, dancing for dimes in the streets of Augusta, doing the odd armed robbery when the need be.

That’s what got him sent up for three years in a juvy camp. After that he tried sports for a while, first as a boxer, then as a baseball pitcher. When injuries kept that from happening, Brown considered music. It was the desperation of the times for a young black man that made trying on so many guises, so many identities, necessary.

“I wanted to be somebody,” Brown said years later.

James grew up with Bobby Byrd, a friend whose family took him in. They started a group, the Famous Flames, a distillation of a gospel group they already belonged to. In 1956 some record label – the Associated Press says it was King Records, the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll says it was Federal Records -- signed the group, and four months later “Please, Please, Please” was in the R&B Top Ten.

For three decades after that, Brown toured almost nonstop, doing cross-country tours, trying out new songs at concerts and earning the title he gave himself, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business.

Part of that hard work was what he did onstage: raw, spontaneous energy punctuated with over-the-top stagecraft. If you went to a James Brown show in the 60’s, you got the full James Brown Experience: the dance moves that others would try at and fail for years, the precise 360-degree spins that found the microphone inches from where James left it when he started the pivot; the heroic splits; the energy of a beat channeled through the funky metronome at the front of the stage.

It went on until James, spent, knelt in exhaustion – and out came the brothers carrying the gold lame cape, covering the weary James and escorting him off the stage.

But then – no: James stops a moment, seemingly shivering under the cape, then he spins, shrugs off the cape and sprints back to the microphone … there was something he forgot to tell y’all. Thus a legend of long and furious encores was born. You can believe it when James said he lost five pounds or more during a show.

His group became a training ground for musicians who went on to their own acclaim: Hendrix played briefly with the Flames; so did members of George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic hybrid; so did bassist Jack Casady before getting his boarding pass for the Jefferson Airplane.

His “Live at The Apollo, Volume 2” in 1962 is widely considered one of the greatest concert records ever and sold more than a million copies in an era when black records never did that well.

James won a Grammy in 1965 for “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and for “Living In America” in 1987. He was one of the first artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, with Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley.

Throughout his career, and despite the accolades, James burnished his cred as a brother’s brother. Songs like “King Heroin” and “Don’t Be a Dropout” held undeniable messages for young and restive black America. He sponsored empowerment programs for black kids when it wasn’t fashionable; in the flashpoint time after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, about the time “Say It Loud” was on the charts, James went on television to calm things down, probably preventing a bad situation from getting worse.

The man’s life had no end of drama. In September 1988, ripped to the tits on PCP and brandishing a shotgun, Brown walked into an insurance seminar next to his Augusta office and asked the people there if they were using his private bathroom. After he left the building, police chased Brown for a half-hour from Augusta into South Carolina and back into Georgia in some wild, “Dukes of Hazzard” shit that ended when police shot out the tires of his truck. He did two years for that, for aggravated assault and failing to stop for a police officer.

For any other star at the age of 58, that might have been enough to bring on retirement. But James kept working, tweaking his show to pull in a younger generation while bearing true faith and allegiance to the funk, and the audience, that got him where he was. Not long after his release, James hit the stage again at a show you needed to pack a lunch to see: a three-hour, pay-per-view concert at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles with an audience that included millions who watched on cable.


It’s sad that, toward the end, James became a parody of himself. In recent years a booking photo from one arrest became part of the pop-cultural photo gallery of stars behaving badly and looking worse (others so honored include Nick Nolte, Wynona Judd, Glenn Campbell and George Clinton).

But that was the minor bullshit, the asterisks and footnotes to a career that, for all practical purposes, continued to the day he checked out. The AP reported that, three days before his death, James joined volunteers at his annual toy giveaway in Augusta, and he planned to perform on New Year’s Eve at B.B. King’s Times Square blues club in New York.

James was consistent. The flamboyance of forty-some years of entrances and exits on stage was mirrored in his big exit on Christmas at 1:45 in the morning. “Almost a dramatic, poetic moment,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson told the AP. “He’ll be all over the news all over the world today. He would have it no other way.”

In any theoretical Mount Rushmore of musical culture, James, pompadour and all, would have to be chiseled high and large and in stark relief from everyone else.

In all the meaningful ways -- both in his message to a young black America desperate for self-worth and potential, and in his music, which bridged the racial divide like no speech or policy ever could -- the man who wanted to be somebody became The Somebody. And hot damn it, if you’re a musician working in rock, hiphop, funk or R&B, no matter how original you think you are, you need to hit at least one knee and thank your personal God for James Brown. One way or another, he made what you do possible.

And don’t feel bad if you never reach his level of Somebody.

Nobody ever will.
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Image credits: The cape walk: © 2006 thetigerduck, London. Image used by fair use provisions under United States law. Apollo Memorial: Benjamen Walker (Flickr), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License > Wikipedia. The statue: Sir Mildred Pierce (Flickr), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License > Wikipedia.

The fangs of Katie Couric

If Perky wasn’t dead before, Perky’s sure as hell dead as fried chicken now. That’s the takeaway message both from Katie Couric’s smart reordering of story emphasis on the “CBS Evening News,” and from a published, teeth-bared reaction to her media critics. At this point some three-odd months into her ascension to the anchor chair, Couric’s finding her range as a television journalist, but she’s a bit more thin-skinned than the girl who woke us up so many mornings could ever be.

From the beginning, there were concerns (some of them aired here) about a features-heavy story play when she started. That’s pretty much given way to a story play more or less consistent with the weight of similar stories on the other nightly newscasts. Her lieutenants in the field – David Martin at the Pentagon, John Blackstone covering the American West, Mark Phillips in London, Lara Logan in Iraq – are solid professionals; the interplay between them and Couric seems more heartfelt than with Bob Schieffer, Couric’s predecessor who, for all his skill as a Washington gumshoe insider, didn’t handle pleasantries from correspondents or small talk all that well.

Set goes to Couric. But then it comes undone. She leads the Dec. 13 broadcast with a story on holiday shopping when other newscasts led, rightly, with the potential bombshell of the mystery illness of South Dakota Democratic Senator Tim Johnson, an illness whose worst-case presentation could throw the leadership of the United States Senate, and the pending shift of the balance of power to the Democrats, into complete disarray.

The viewing public is a creature of habit, just like anyone in it. To judge from the ratings, viewers are more comfortable with NBC’s Brian Williams or ABC’s Charles Gibson talking to them over dinner. Nielsen Media Research reported that, for the week of Dec. 4, NBC’s evening news broadcast culled 9.1 million viewers in the multichannel universe. ABC’s newscast pulled down 9 million viewers, and the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” garnered 7.5 million viewers – a fact that keeps CBS about where it’s been for some time, firmly in command of third place.

Maybe viewers still have a lingering memory of the Rather debacle, or how CBS tried a variety of anchor experiments before settling on Schieffer before settling down with Katie.

But two statements stand out as signs of Couric clearly bustin’ a death cap in Perky’s ass, and her probably growing frustration with her program’s inability to gain ground on the competition.

La Couric was quoted in James Wolcott’s column in the new issue of Vanity Fair, saying "[w]e kind of ignore people who are observing everything we do and praising, criticizing or analyzing it." That rather imperial diss arrived about the same time that Radar Online circulated excerpts of an interview Couric had with Tom Junod of Esquire magazine. You can almost see Katie’s canines emerging as she speaks, barely disguising exasperation. “You guys even take a shot at me. You have something in the November issue, something about how since I’ve become an anchor, you don’t know me anymore. You don’t know me anymore? Bite me.”

Katie Couric thus joins … [drumroll please] ...
THE PANTHEON OF CBS NEWS ANCHORS
WITH LEGENDARY QUOTES

Murrow: “Good night and good luck.”

Cronkite: “And that’s the way it is.”

Couric: “Bite me.”

Like any worthy professional in a position where results are evaluated on a week-to-week basis, Couric’s eager to make her mark sooner rather than later. But her sniping at Esquire magazine does more than reveal a petulant streak; it suggests that she doesn’t understand the nature of television. A medium that provides more or less immediate information can be expected to generate more or less immediate reactions to that information, and how it’s presented to people.

We’d be inclined to write it off to sophomore jitters if it were anyone other than Couric, an old hand in the medium, especially its’ morning talk-show wars. But with statements like that, she’s biting the medium that feeds her, and the public that feeds that medium. There’s a sense that she thinks the “CBS Evening News” is supposed to be immune from adverse reaction. If she really feels like that … maybe we don’t know her anymore.

Couric’s testiness is coming, ironically enough, when she’s finding the sweet spot as a TV journalist. Maybe now she’ll dial back her expectations of herself, just a little. When you’ve set those expectations so high, having essentially said you intend to reshape the known model of evening broadcast news, you’re off your meds if you don’t think viewers will react, and fast, favorably or otherwise.

The opening-day hoopla is over, Katie; now it’s time to settle down on the mound and pitch. Don’t forget, the audience is always the umpire. Always. And you’ve been in television long enough to know that.

Cut and [add verb here]

When President Bush appeared at the White House in a joint appearance with Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush stood and began to outline his “new way forward” for the United States in Iraq. As he spoke, the President of the United States had the expression of a man with the fear; his eyes were set in the expression of someone stuck in a moment he can’t get out of, quagmired in something he didn't anticipate and can't conjure a way out of.

On Monday President Bush finally, fully looked like that which he has been for some time: a man with few options on the situation in Iraq. The way he looks suggests there’s been a hunt for wiggle room as events unfold in the killing grounds of Baghdad and the volatile Anbar province.

The president and some in his inner circle have in the days since the release of the Iraq Study Group made a big show of deliberation over its findings. The administration has given lip service, at the very least, to the kind of thoughtful consideration and consultation with others that should have been a part of the White House’s handling of the crisis all along.

President Bush is gearing up to deliver a Major Statement on the war sometime between now and Christmas. We can only guess at its content, but all the digesting and chin-pulling now underway can’t disguise the need for something that is a true departure from the policies of the past. This time he’s going to have to do more than repackage old goods in pretty paper for the holidays. Wrapping the old intransigence inside a new slogan won’t do. Some in his party are announcing their discontent. Sen.Gordon Smith is the latest in the GOP to break ranks with the administration’s stand on Iraq.

The method and style of our departure can be described all kinds of ways. But the bottom-line reality will be the same. Whether it’s cut and run or cut and walk, turn, shift, stroll, saunter, sashay, glide, flee, slide, creep, drift, levitate, ambulate, tiptoe, sprint, astral-project, vamoose, depart or dash, the working reality is, or should be, the same:

Within a time frame that needs to be defined and adhered to regardless of the politics on the ground in either Baghdad or Washington, it means to cut and leave – to realize the gravity of a national error and to fully undertake its correction by removing its proximate cause: our military presence in the country, as destabilizing as it is constructive.

It means using the leverage of that time frame to concentrate the mind of the Iraqi government on doing what must be done to remain a government.

It means understanding that there’s no way of knowing if Iraq can work as a democracy until the enforcer’s shadow is out of the picture.

It means that when we leave, whenever we leave, the contours of the Iraqi government will reshape themselves to suit the traditions and values and cultures of the people of Iraq, whether we like it or not.

It means that neither the United States, nor any other member of the phantom coalition, can be the indefinite guarantor of ideals the Iraqi people fail to embrace of their own free will.

It means recognizing and accepting that there’s absolutely nothing we can do to prevent “our enemies,” in the broadest and most imprecise sense of the word, from characterizing our military departure from Iraq as a victory, whenever it happens.

But it also means having grown as a nation, to ourselves and to our allies, by having experienced both the tragedy of error and the power of will to mitigate the impact of that error, and to fix as much of it as possible.

It means beginning to put this nation on a road to a real reconciliation -- red states with blue states, hawks with doves, the Sunnis and Shiites of America -- of one of the most profound differences between us as Americans.

It means a start to restoring America’s place in the world, regaining the moral high ground and existential pride of place that makes this nation what it is.

It means taking some solace in knowing that by altering the present course, it saves us from the scale of personal agony and national woe that traumatized this nation in the years of Vietnam.

It means nothing more or less than learning from the mistakes of the past.
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Image credit: White House (public domain)

The wake-up bomb

It’s ninety-seven pages long; you can read it in a day (hell, you probably will before the president does). It was released to the world on Wednesday, a physically modest report on the American military presence in Iraq, the origins of that presence and the consequences for staying there. While some of it is a narrative, codified form of what people in the United States have been saying for months ((if not years), all of it represents the biggest challenge to the stasis of the current military effort since the war began.

The Iraq Study Report may be the wake-up call for the war effort, a document that, while breaking no new ground on offering solutions, is effective both because of its brevity and its bipartisan genesis. The group, commissioned by Congress in March, was composed of ten bipartisan members and chaired by James Baker III and Lee Hamilton, two former Capitol Hill operatives as known for their clear-eyed intellect and drive as for their political inclinations. Consequently, it won’t do for the President to dismiss its findings as the partisan rant of the Democrats looking for payback. The power of the report is the simplicity of its arguments and the variety of voices, from both sides of the aisle, roused to make them.

For some, and despite the sense of fellow feeling the report is meant to convey, criticism of the Republican war effort is implicit in its conclusions. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, interviewed Wednesday by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, said “it would be hard not to see in this report a rebuke of an ideologically-driven strategy that has been blind to what’s [been] happening on the ground for the last several years.”

Even before the thing came out, the White House and its proxies were spinning furiously, downplaying the impact of something they hadn’t seen yet. Gen. Peter Pace tried to have it both ways when asked to characterize the progress of American forces in Iraq. “We’re not winning, but we’re not losing,” the general said, uttering words that we never thought we’d hear coming from one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Hell, there’s not a military man in the last hundred years, from George S. Patton to Beetle Bailey, that doesn’t know the fundamental rule of American military might: it is not defined by attrition. Standing still is contrary to the military dynamic – and especially the American military dynamic. With the instincts, power and stealth of a shark, the American military machine is defined by forward action. In the classic zero-sum gain scenario, if the U.S. military isn’t winning, it is losing. And we’ve come to understand, over the last three years and nine months, that the Iraq war doesn’t respond to the convenient polarities of “winning” and “losing” anyway, even if the Cold Warriors still do.

For Obama, and no doubt for others, the report is a step toward distilling that kind of verbiage and administration spin into something coherent and accurate. “For the first time, what we’re seeing is a bipartisan agreement about facts on the ground,” he said.

The big question is what President Bush will do with it. Early signs are not promising. Today a testy Bush did a joint standup with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, himself a lame duck as leader of the UK, and essentially repeated his longstanding contention that staying the course is the only viable strategy.

At the root of the president’s persistent calculus is the need to keep American forces in place in Iraq until a viable government can establish rule of law over the entire country. But that reasoning in pursuit of a Middle Eastern democracy that can, in Bush’s words, “govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself” may be ultimately self-defeating.

The truest test of a democracy is what happens when you take away the guns needed to start one. Sooner or later, the democratic ideal can’t be enforced at gunpoint; a democratic government’s got to take root and flourish on its own. Ultimately it stands or falls on nothing more, or less, than the confidence, good will and energies of the people living in it. For that reason, the United States will never know for certain if Iraq is capable of a functional, thriving participatory democracy until we do leave.

The Iraq Study Report, therefore, calls out the Bush administration to set a timetable not so much for our troops’ withdrawal as for the moment for the Iraqi people to decide -- indigenously, on their own terms -- whether they believe in that form of government or not. At the very least, the report is a forthright cry for reality as well as action. In that respect, it’s a valuable document. Let’s hope the White House sees that.
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Image credit: The White House (public domain)

Goodwrench for President?!

On Wednesday the bipartisan Iraq Study Group will issue its long-awaited report on the situation in Iraq. It’s a document whose impact is widely anticipated to call for a change, however predictable to our adversaries and to us, in the United States’ military policy of engagement in Iraq. It’s a sign of the report’s anticipated impact that TV news anchors announced plans to broadcast live from Washington – not New York, where they’re all headquartered.

“Live, from the Congressional Printing Office -- ” We’ll find out if that pans out.

But whatever the report says, whatever its recommendations, it will be quietly seen as another thoughtfully momentous expression of the skills and smarts of one of the Group’s prime movers, a leader in the panel that is also known as the Baker Commission, named for James Baker III, the one man who should impart a deep and abiding fear in the Democratic leadership contemplating 2008.

We’ve been treated to a laundry list of likelies for the 2008 Republican nomination. There’s Rudy Giuliani, the abrasive but passionate America’s Mayor still riding a wave of favorable sentiment “in the wake of” Sept. 11. There’s John McCain, a longtime favorite of moderates in both parties and a party man who may be due to cash in on enduring mainstream popularity. Sam Brownback is weighing his options; so is Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whose bona fides don’t strike party loyalists as being too conservative. There are others too, names dropped as much for good cocktail conversation as anything else.


We propose a possible name to add to the ones above, a list of what at this point can only be called the Usual Suspects. You want to drop a name at a cocktail party? Right or wrong, you read it here first: Go with James Baker for President in 2008.

Serious as a heart attack, Republican strategists might well be saying: In a time when the Party is under siege as much from within as from without; when scandals from carnal to financial have undercut the confidence of the party faithful; when the enemy runs Congress; when minorities are deserting the party, lowering percentages that were weak to start with, there’s no danger at all in riding the right dark horse to victory.

Whether he'd be willing to subject himself to the rigors of a campaign is another matter entirely. But on paper, at least, James Baker is precisely the kind of tough, smart, experienced, pragmatic, multi-hyphenate operator the GOP needs in order to win.

If nothing else, consider the man's resume: Baker led the legal team that beat back the Al Gore challenge in the Hanging Chad Incident of 2000. He was White House Chief of Staff for two administrations, and also served treasury secretary and secretary of state. A fixer par excellence, he helped broker the deal that assembled the first Gulf War coalition under Bush #41.


Then there’s the other factors: Baker’s perceived as a practical centrist, a mechanic at a high level, someone able to wield old connections and a formidable organizational mind to take on challenges critical to the nation’s future.

In a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon in the latest issue of Newsweek, two elves sit building toys in the runup to Christmas. Another elf, James Baker, stands elsewhere, working on disjointed contraptions in a box marked “IRAQ WAR.”

“Who’s the new elf?” one elf asks his co-worker.

“Santa calls him in when something’s really broken,” the second elf says.

There’s already a quiet undertone of mystery about the 2008 contest, a sense that a dark horse could come on strong from out of nowhere and win the nomination, and the presidency. Right now, the 2008 election is characterized more by what we don’t know than what we do know.

Because of that, Baker 2008 isn’t out of left field at all. A candidate with, uh, unimpeachable White House bona fides and gravitas in the private sector could be the nightmare that wakes Democrats up in the dead of night, drives them into party offices, stumbling over the furniture in the scramble to the white boards and phone banks.

Why? Because Baker’s electable – maybe more then Republicans can realize or Democrats will admit.
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Image credits: U.S. State Department and the White House (public domain)

Bolton bolts

As anyone could have predicted the day after the election on Nov. 7, John R. Bolton is on his way out as U.N. ambassador. Reading the handwriting on the wall (written in 400-point type after the Democrats swept Congress a month ago), the combative, abrasive ambassador announced that he would step down when his recess appointment ends, at the end of the current session of Congress.

The long knives on Capitol Hill and on the East River can now rest, knowing that Bolton, a lightning rod for admninistration policies related to Iraq specifically and our relations with other nations generally, will shortly exit the scene.

Newsweek columnist Michael Hirsh understood the relationship Bolton had, and didn't have, with the U.N.: "A brilliant Yale-educated lawyer, Bolton could be sharp and effective negotiating resolutions inside the Security Council. But by temperament and philosophy he had little use for the organization he worked in. Bolton simply never believed that the U.N., or at least large parts of it, had a right to exist.

"Indeed Bolton was so objectionable a presence, even to stalwart allies like Britain, that on a number of votes on which U.S.-friendly countries used to abstain—like anti-Israel resolutions, small arms treaties or family planning programs—they often voted against Washington. During his almost 18 months in office, a once-mild caucus of developing countries inside the U.N. called the G-77 came to be a strong unified voice against Bolton—and against America."

This is the great -- but not insurmountable -- challenge facing the next American envoy to the U.N.: correcting the damage done over the past 18 months by an ambassador of a nation at odds with the world his ambassadorship says he's a part of.

Quiet as kept, one of the main reasons that Bolton gained no real traction at the U.N. was illustrated in the very fact of what it took to get him into the job in the first place. Bolton was a recess appointment, one of those named to cabinet posts under a loophole in the process of congressional oversight on matters of weighty appointments. Basically that loophole gives the president the leverage to appoint someone to a position while Congress is in recess, bypassing the usual vetting and confirmation process.

It's all legal and above board; there are no constitutional crises that arise when the president decides to make a recess appointment. But at the end of the day, it just looks bad when a president has to do an end-run around another branch of government to nail down a hire he wants. That's all. It seems petty and dictatorial. It just ... looks bad.

And one suspects that other diplomats around the world won't be swayed into thinking that what they'd observed on Capitol Hill and the White House over the previous year was just a bureaucratic foulup, a technical fact of life, like the Brits debating whether or not to wear wigs in the House of Lords. They'll rightly see the Bolton appointment for what it is: something bigger, something deeper than cosmetics, nothing less than a fight for some aspect of the soul of the country.

The next ambassador will be vetted and confirmed, or not, by a majority Democratic Congress, one presumably enlightened by the idea of finding a conciliator to work the halls and podia of the one globally-accepted forum for conciliation.

The challenge for the Congress is to approve someone ready to rise above political agenda, to embrace the United Nations rather than bridle at the deliberations that make the U.N. what it is. The challenge for President Bush is to nominate soneone who'll do that.