Another good column from Mark Steyn, on the tiresomely familiar posturing of Democratic Senators at John Bolton’s confirmation hearings: Bolton’s just too hip for scaredy-cat Dems.

If the Senate poseurs and the media wanted to mount a trenchant critique of Bolton’s geopolitical philosophy, that would be reasonable enough. But there’s not even a pretense of any of that. Instead, his opponents have seized on one episode — an intelligence analyst in a critical position with whom Bolton and others were dissatisfied — and used it to advance the bizarre proposition that every junior official should be beyond reproach, and certainly beyond such aggressive “body language” as putting one’s hands on hips. Or as Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, complained to the BBC the other night: Bolton was “disloyal to his subordinates.”

It’s been obvious for three years now that the torpid federal bureaucracies — the agencies that so comprehensively failed America on 9/11 — are resistant to meaningful reform, but Beinart, in demanding that the executive branch swear fealty to the most incompetent underling, distills the “reform” charade to its essence: We’ll talk reform, we’ll pass reform bills, we’ll merge and de-merge and re-merge every so often, we’ll change three-letter acronyms (INS) to four-letter acronyms (BCIS) just to show how serious we are, and a year or four down the line we may well get real tough and require five-letter acronyms.

But in the end we believe underperforming bureaucrats in key roles should be allowed to go on underperforming until retirement age. And, if you happen to show you’re just the teensy-weensiest bit upset with one of them, we’ll blow it up into a month of hearings on TV.