This is an editorial about President Bush and his new ambassador to the United Nations, not about The New York Sun, but it’s one of those moments when it’s impossible to resist a brief toot of our own horn. We ran our editorial on President Bush’s nomination of John Bolton as American ambassador to the United Nations back on January 12, 2005, nearly two months before Mr. Bush made the nomination public. The editorial, headlined, “Bush and Bolton,” concluded, “He would make an extraordinary ambassador to the United Nations. It’s not the only job we could think of for him, but it’s one where he could make a mark like another great scholar-bureaucrat did in the 1970s – Daniel Patrick Moynihan.”

Well, you heard it here first.

Now that the nomination is official, both Messrs. Bolton and Bush are to be congratulated. It has been said of Mr. Bush that he is the right man at the right time at the right place, but the same could be said of Mr. Bolton in the role at the United Nations. In a chapter for a 1996 book issued by the Cato Institute, Mr. Bolton wrote, “Some Americans simply want to withdraw from the United Nations, believing that it can never really be fixed. I understand the frustrations and disappointments that lead to that view, even though I disagree with it. We should tell the world community instead, ‘Let’s make one last effort to put things right at the UN. And make no mistake, our patience is not unlimited.’ “It’s now nearly a decade into that “one last effort,” and what the U.N. has to show for it is an oil-for-food scandal in Iraq, peacekeepers accused of rape in the Congo, and failure to prevent a genocide in Darfur. It’s responded to these failings by asserting it needs to do a better job of public relations. If the U.N. was ever in need of a forceful reminder that American patience is not unlimited, this is the moment.

Mr. Bolton won confirmation to his current post, that of undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, by a Senate vote of 57 to 43 in May of 2001. Back then, Senators Clinton and Schumer opposed his nomination. Senator Biden, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, probably offered the best explanation of their votes when he confessed to Mr. Bolton during the Senate confirmation proceedings back in 2001, “This is not about your competence. My problem with you over the years has been you have been too competent. I mean, I would rather you be stupid and not very effective.” Talk about putting partisanship ahead of patriotism. As New Yorkers, though, Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Clinton surely have some interest in making the United Nations an institution that isn’t an embarrassment to its host city. Both senators claim to be friends of Israel; Mr. Bolton calls his role in the campaign to repeal the U.N.’s “Zionism is Racism” resolution one of the highlights of his career. The right move for the senators from New York this time around would be to back Mr. Bolton.