Bolton: Trump congratulating his boss was "a matter of being polite"

[Miles Archer]

Bolton was a leading advocate of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and served in the George W. Bush administration, first as an undersecretary of state for arms control and nonproliferation, where he opposed international arms control and nonproliferation efforts. He was then a UN Ambassador who opposed international organizations like the very one he was working in.

Since leaving government he has positioned himself as a Republican political operative—and he mulled 2012 presidential bid—as well as a reliable supporter for war. In 2009, Bolton, in a speech at the University of Chicago, seemed to call for Israel to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran: “Unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.” In a 2012 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he joked about a nuclear attack on Chicago, President Obama’s hometown. The crack was part of a riff in which he accused Obama of lacking a backbone in dealing with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Obama “put us in a greatly weakened position” with Russia, Bolton said.

But Bolton’s views on Russia have since apparently evolved. On Fox News on Thursday, Bolton declined to fault Trump’s decision to congratulate Putin on his victory in an election widely seen as illegitimate—a move that drew bipartisan condemnation. “It’s a matter of being polite,” Bolton said.

In 2013, Bolton was himself “polite,” taking part in a bizarre video in which he implored the Russian government to loosen gun laws. The video was used by a Russian gun rights group created by Alexander Torshin, a former Russian senator and ally of Putin. At the time, Torshin was trying to cultivate ties to the National Rifle Association and went on to seek contact with the 2016 Trump campaign. Torshin is now the subject of a reported FBI investigation into whether he used the NRA to funnel funds to Trump’s campaign.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/this-is-the-scariest-news-of-the-trump-presidency/

[Tommy_Carcetti]

1. When dealing with Putin, it's always good to be "polite."

Because you don't want to be in the position of him being "impolite" in return, if he has some reason to know something about you where he would be "impolite."