President Bush will appoint John Bolton this week to be America’s next ambassador to the United Nations. One can almost hear the liberals already: John Bolton was abusive to intelligence analysts; he had the temerity to call Kim Jong Il a tyrant on the eve of six-party talks; he did not fill out his disclosure forms properly. Like so much of the minority party’s recent grievances, its pending protests will say more about them than about Mr. Bolton.

For a catalogue of these hysterics, see the Web site of Steve Clemons (www.thewashingtonnote.com), where all manner of innuendo has been published in the cause of defaming the next American ambassador to Turtle Bay. My favorite is the entry from May 11, 2005, in which Mr. Clemons hinted that he had confirmed a rumor – floated by Hustler magazine’s publisher, Larry Flynt – alleging Mr. Bolton frequented wife-swapping sex clubs in the late 1970s by referring to a phone conversation with his former wife. Mr. Clemons, it should be said, did not actually write the sex-club story; he linked to a version of it in his comments. He preferred to take the slightly higher road and spool thin speculation about John Bolton’s nonexistent role in the Niger document forgeries or his alleged use of signal intelligence to intimidate colleagues.

Aside from the fact that much of what Mr. Bolton’s opponents say about him amounts to deliberate distortion, their obsession is also an evasion. While Washington liberals chattered about John Bolton’s temper, a real scandal was unfolding. Scores of documents now show that U.N. contractors, leading politicians in France and Russia, and quite possibly the secretary-general’s own son colluded with one of the world’s most venal dictators to profit from the starvation and malnutrition of Iraqi children. This crime against humanity was made possible by the two prior administrations’ policies of sanctions, a cruel compromise between war and peace that saddled Iraqis with the horrors of both Saddam Hussein and economic devastation.

If you were to only read the Nation, Daily Kos, or the minutes of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the Bolton nomination, you would never know this. You would learn, however, that Mr. Bolton may not have accurately remembered the time of a 2002 appointment to CIA headquarters for a meeting his opponents said was part of a plot to remove an intelligence analyst, Fulton Armstrong, from the National Intelligence Council. Senator Biden, a Democrat of Delaware, uncovered logs that proved Mr. Bolton had his meetings in the morning, not the afternoon, as Mr. Bolton told the committee. Cue collective jaw dropping.

You would hear about a former USAID contractor named Melody Townsel, who in 1995 said Mr. Bolton chased her through a Moscow hotel, and how the future ambassador may have also thrown a stapler at Ms. Townsel, who would later help form the Dallas chapter of “Mothers Against Bush.” It turned out there was not enough evidence for Senate Democrats to determine the truth of this 10-year-old recollection.

Not so long ago, Democrats bemoaned how some Republicans were more focused on trivial non-scandals than our national security. When then House majority leader, Tom Delay, called the 1999 intervention that aborted Serb efforts to cleanse Kosovo of its Albanians “Clinton’s War,” Democrats and neoconservatives rightly chided him for playing politics with our military. Mr. Delay briefly found himself in an alliance with his party’s isolationists and a far left that had been apologizing for the butcher of Belgrade.

Today, it is Democratic leaders who often deride the struggle of an elected government in Iraq against the remnants of Baathism and a resurgent Al Qaeda as “Bush’s War.” It is the liberals today who join the foreign policy advisers of the president’s father in challenging whether an Iraqi democracy is even worth fighting for. This crowd has nothing to say about the oil-for-food program, but it fills the airwaves, Internet and Congressional Record blackening the reputation of the man the president is sending to the United Nations to make sure this kind of real scandal never happens again.

None of this is to say that Democrats should agree with every policy the president has proposed. Democrats could have followed up on Mr. Bolton’s response to Senator Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, regarding whether he would have done anything different about the genocide in Rwanda had he been ambassador to the United Nations at the time. Mr. Bolton ended up saying he did not know, an answer which invites scrutiny.

Instead, the Democrats preferred to go into detail to prove something anyone who followed Washington knew already: John Bolton disagreed with the intelligence community and the Foreign Service on the prudence of the president’s foreign policy. Are we to conclude that the Democrats now stand for the principle that political appointees should not challenge the judgment of the national security bureaucracy? Will they propose the Intelligence Analysts Protection Act of 2005?

Ultimately, this argument did not persuade a majority of the Senate. And it’s a good thing that the president is prepared to ignore the minority this week and send Mr. Bolton to the United Nations. Serious work remains for the republic.