Bolton Unplugged on Obama’s Nobel Speech

“Greta: What do you think of the speech? Ambassador John Bolton: I thought it was a pretty bad speech. I thought it was turgid, repetitive, I thought it was analytically weak, sort of at a high school level. It's like he didn't have any lead in his pencil after his speeches at the UN and his speeches on Afghanistan. So all in all a pretty surprisingly disappointing performance. --In circumstances like that, one alternative is not to say very much, is to thank the Nobel Committee for the award and accept it in humility and then sit down. Sometimes when people don't have much to say, they don't say very much, other people say it for times as long which seemed to be the way he did it. --I think that this was a conscience effort by the Nobel Committee which has been over the years a very highly politicized body to try and effect the American political environment, to try and send a signal of what they wanted from an Obama presidency. I think that it's a big mistake on their part, I believe our own political polls show that. I think that it will turn out to be a mill stone around the president's neck, but that's obviously not the way the Nobel Committee saw it. --I think that you have to look as I said, back as well to the speeches at the United Nations, and what was striking was how little new was in this speech. But I think it's important in looking at how Obama addresses national security. Not to try and parse his speech too carefully, not to say,’ well I like this paragraph, but I don't like this paragraph.’ You have to look at the speech whole, just as you have to look at the man behind the speech whole, and I think that's where he runs into difficulty. This speech in Oslo is filled with some of the most amazing misconceptions about everything from human nature to the role of the United States in the world. --Lets start near the beginning of the speech. He says, that ‘We have to acknowledge the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict from our life times.’ Well no kidding, homo sapiens are hard wired for conflict and we're not going to eliminate violent conflict until homo sapiens ceases to exist as a separate species. The whole notion that you could even think about eliminating it, not just in our life time but soon there after, I think reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. When you start from that kind of position it only gets worse from there. I've got other examples to.

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