An open letter to Foreign Relations Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-IN):

Despite the fact that you have twenty-nine years of public service in the United States Senate and that you were a Rhodes Scholar, you could not be more wrong in your released statement that concluded, “I believe that the President deserves to have his nominee [Bolton] represent him at the United Nations.”

Lesson #1
It does not matter what you believe because one’s beliefs cannot be verified or falsified. You cannot prove my beliefs to be wrong, and you cannot prove my beliefs to be right. How could one possibly legislate based solely on faith? Law, and therefore government, needs to be based on rationality and empirical data; otherwise, our government is theocratic and authoritarian, where personal conviction determines governance.

Lesson #2
The president of the United States does not deserve anything but, according to our Constitution, he does have the power to “nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors.” It is your duty, dear senator, to advise and, if appropriate, consent. Nowhere in the Constitution are you to abdicate your responsibility as an elected official and merely yield to the wishes of the executive branch. Sucking from the same ideological teat gives you neither the right nor the power to demolish 216 years of separation of powers and checks and balances among the three branches of our government.

Lesson #3
The US ambassador to the United Nations does not merely represent the president but rather the whole electorate. In that regard, he or she should be representative of the American people at large and not a spiteful and angry ideologue from a neoconservative minority.

And that’s just one sentence….