As the Senate gets ready to consider the nomination of Secretary Bolton to be America’s representative at the United Nations, the Democrats are having difficulty articulating exactly what it is about the mustachioed maven of international relations that makes his enemies reckon he is so horrible. Much is being made of a letter from Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, alleging that the undersecretary of state pressured analysts to forward poor intelligence on Iraq’s quest to procure uranium from Niger. Some suggest that he is unsuitable because he has bluntly criticized the utility of the U.N. bureaucracy and questioned whether America’s foreign policy should be constrained by international law.

Still others write in scandalized tones that Mr. Bolton would like America to recognize the sovereignty of China’s only province being governed democratically, Taiwan. The latest story tarnishing Mr. Bolton comes from Newsweek. It cites anonymous sources who contend Mr. Bolton tried to have his intelligence briefer, Christian Westermann, transferred. The idea seems to be his motive was that the analyst lobbied the CIA to strike a line warning of Cuba’s limited biological weapons capability from a May 2002 speech Mr. Bolton gave to the Heritage Foundation. The gist of the claim seems to be that Mr. Bolton is a rogue himself, undermining the integrity of the intelligence community to advance a more bellicose foreign policy.

More than 60 former ambassadors bestirred themselves to sign a letter last month asking the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Richard Lugar, to reject his nomination, and asserting, “John Bolton’s unsubstantiated claims that Cuba and Syria are working on biological weapons further discredited the effect of U.S. warnings and U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.” The anti-Bolton crowd would have you believe that the president’s nominee was the only person in government who believed Cuba was stockpiling deadly germs.

Yet on March 19, 2002, the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, Carl Ford, told the Senate that “The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited developmental offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to rogue states.”

That was almost the exact language Mr. Bolton used in his speech the following May, and similar language Mr. Ford again used in congressional testimony in June. Indeed, the estimate that Fidel Castro might be stockpiling germs and sharing germ-making technology with other dangerous actors was a conclusion the intelligence community reached in 1999. Only last year did the analysts change their minds, after re-looking at the raw data.

The State Department’s intelligence unit has been praised for being more skeptical of much of the Iraq intelligence before the war. Yet here is the bureaucrat in charge of that office confirming an estimate on Cuban capabilities Mr. Bolton’s critics would have the public believe was the result of undue pressure on reluctant analysts. The point here is that those opposing Mr. Bolton’s nomination to the United Nations have proven that they will say just about anything to derail his appointment, a fact that will loom large as the Foreign Relations Committee sits down tomorrow to consider Mr. Bolton on the merits in open hearings.