ew!John Bolton is the acting US Embassador to the United Nations. He has not been confirmed in that position because the majority of US lawmakers don’t think he’s fit for the job. He has demonstrated again and again that he is an arrogant, uncaring person who acts as a tool for the neoconservative agenda in the US.

Bolton’s recent statements on Canadians killed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebannon are just beyond the pale, over the line; incredible. He’s now playing God and parsing the value and moral equivalence of various kinds of deaths (and therefore lives). He says flat out that a dead Canadian civilian does not have the same moral standing as a dead Israeli civilian, because the intentions of the killer were different.

Asked to comment on the deaths in an Israeli air strike of eight Canadian citizens in southern Lebanon Sunday, he said: “it is a matter of great concern to us …that these civilian deaths are occurring. It’s a tragedy.”

“I think it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts,” he added, while defending as “self-defense” Israel’s military action, which has had “the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths”.

The eight dead Canadians were a Lebanese-Canadian couple, their four children, his mother and an uncle, said relatives in Montreal.

Has Prime Minister Harper spoken out against this atrocious devaluation of Canadian lives? I haven’t seen him comment on Bolton’s gross insult to Canada. Why?

Perhaps Harper is quiet on this because he and his Straussian mentor Tom Flanagan are simply part of the same cabal who are running the show in the US right now. They approve of Bolton. They approve of the idea, beginning with Plato, running through Machiavelli and countless other writers, and finally taking full bloom in Strauss and his followers, of the (ig)Noble Lie that Shrubya has been caught in so often. They are evangelical Christians who include “America, the Beautiful” in the hymnal at their church. They are in lock-step with American foreign policy.

It’s almost enough to make me vote Liberal in the next election, provided Michael Ignatieff doesn’t win, since he’s part of it as well, and helped Bush smooth the slippery slope from “coercive interrogation” to torture with his sophisticated bafflegab.