It almost counts as tact on the part of the White House that it waited until Monday to announce Bolton's recess appointment, instead of making the announcement on Friday as soon as the limos speeding senators to Ronald Reagan airport on their ways home had left the U.S. Capitol.

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The American Revolution was not about tea. It was about rum: the real spirit of 1776.

The tea that was thrown into Boston Harbor was actually tax free, and the men throwing it overboard were doing so at the behest of local merchants who had warehouses filled with more expensive smuggled tea that they could sell only if the British East India Co.'s cheaper cargo was unloaded. They knew that no amount of patriotism would stop the Bostonians from buying a cheaper product.

But the real conflict between the colonists and Britain began over taxes on molasses, not tea. And that's where the French come in. The Founding Fathers not only loved the French, but they also loved the molasses that Paris' Caribbean colonies produced -- and they loved even more the rum that New England distillers made from it.

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Without saying it quite as explicitly as Bolton has said it in the past, the American position was to deny that the treaty has any force over the United States while at the same time demanding that it be applied vigorously against those it has unilaterally nominated as bearings on the "axis of evil." The Bush administration refused to allow anything else substantial, such as previous American commitments in the treaty and at earlier conferences, onto the agenda.

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Rarely has a nominee been damned with such faint praise by his own party. Indeed, from their public disquiet about Bolton's qualifications, we must assume that only the deepest party loyalties -- or the fear that Karl Rove would put the severed head of their favorite horses in their beds while they slept -- kept the likes of Lincoln Chafee, Chuck Hagel, George Voinovich and Lugar from outright rebellion.

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It is emblematic that among the few actual changes he recommends to the text of the U.N. Charter are the deletion of its clauses penalizing Germany and Japan and the abolition of the Military Staff Joint Committee that was supposed to coordinate operations against any resurgence by those nations. The committee has met every two weeks for all those decades without making a single decision, and the "former enemy powers" are expected to be invited to join the former victors as permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

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President Bush's appointment sends an eloquent message of utter contempt for the U.N. and all its members -- which happen to include almost every country in the world. Indeed, the only significant country without a vote in the U.N. is one of the few that will be happy with the appointment. Taiwan had hired Bolton as a consultant for $30,000 to advise it on its, as it transpired, unsuccessful bid to join the organization.

There is still the chance for a sanity clause to be resurrected in Washington. When it comes time for confirmation, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is relatively evenly balanced at 10 to eight, and its majority chairman, Richard Lugar, is eminently sane and surely realizes the damage that this appointment will do to American diplomacy.

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In interviews yesterday, U.N. officials and other experts in foreign affairs suggested that by heeding the global cry against a unilateral U.S. invasion, Bush had skillfully maneuvered the world governing body into a position where it had little choice but to sharply increase pressure on the Iraqi dictator. If the U.N. did not act, the experts said, it would appear incapable of enforcing the Gulf War resolutions it passed to control Saddam -- and which Saddam has flouted in recent years.

Now, the Security Council seems likely pass a difficult choice on to Saddam: Either quickly agree to admit a new team of weapons inspectors with unconditional access to Iraqi facilities or face an invasion.

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After Vieira de Mello's nomination was announced on Monday, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, "[Vieira de Mello] brings to the job an impressive diplomatic and U.N. background, but he lacks hands-on human rights experience. The challenge he faces is to prove that he will stand up to governments and be an unwavering voice on behalf of the victims of human rights abuse."

As Vieira de Mello himself told Reuters, "The job in itself is a minefield ... It is the risk of politicization and how to manage that, how to ensure that human rights are not over politicized." And no one can vouch for his assertion better than Mary Robinson, the outgoing high commissioner, whose term ends on the now iconic date of Sept.11. It's common knowledge that her defense of the Durban Conference against Racism, which U.S. and Israeli representatives walked out of, her views on the Israel-Palestine conflict and her condemnation of the U.S. treatment of prisoners in Camp X-ray at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay provoked the Bush administration to oppose the extension of her term.

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The U.S. "does not intend to become a party" to the International Criminal Court, Bolton wrote, and therefore "has no legal obligation arising from its signature" on the Rome statute that established the ICC.

Reversing the ICC agreement was a strange role for Bolton, since as undersecretary of state for disarmament affairs and international security he does not exactly have the court in his bailiwick. But the busy Bolton has never let his job title blunt his ambition, and he has emerged as an energetic force trying to return the Bush administration to its pre-Sept. 11 habits of unilateralism, thumbing its nose at the rest of the world.

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Now, two weeks after ignoring Bush's demand for an end -- "without delay" -- to Israel's Operation Defensive Shield, Sharon has succeeded in rebuffing a U.N. fact-finding mission in Jenin, apparently with U.S. blessing. An angry Kofi Annan called off the planned inquiry late Wednesday. Israel may escape immediate consequences for its defiance, but the obstruction will have far-reaching ramifications: for the country's image, for the United Nations, for the U.S.'s diplomatic stature, and above all for the administration's war on terror, which seems increasingly to be shorthand for "leave Afghanistan a shambles, let Sharon have his way in the West Bank, and full speed ahead to Baghdad."

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Even before he became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms used and abused his power as ranking Republican on the committee to turn American diplomacy into an oxymoron, making the world's only superpower the object of sniggers, incredulous exasperation and dogged opposition among its allies as well as enemies.

Helms was widely reviled by liberals for his atavistic views on race, affirmative action and gay rights. "If the homosexuals would stop doing what they are doing, an end would be put to all future cases of AIDS," he once said memorably. An ardent segregationist, in 1996 he played the race card in his last race with Harvey Gantt, an African-American, with a nationally attacked television ad featuring a white worker ostensibly rejected for a job because of his race.

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Even so, despite this brief moment of lucidity, the city fathers left intact local laws that declared La Verkin a U.N.-free zone, and banned the U.N. from taxing the city or stationing U.N. troops there. They categorically forbade the flying of the U.N. flag from the City Hall flagstaff. The Associated Press quotes Eliot Hill, clearly one of the few voices of sanity among the 3,300 La Verkin residents, as saying, "All this does is make us look like a bunch of kooks."

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Some Democrats have seen the vote as a particular rebuff to the Bush administration and its attitude. But defeat should really be seen as the result of a long-standing American neglect of diplomacy. Certainly, the Bush administration has made some embarrassing mistakes: Picking a major campaign contributor who does not speak French to serve as U.S. ambassador to France was unfortunate. So was the failure to push the appointment of the U.S. ambassador-designate to the United Nations, John Negroponte, through the Senate. Many of the diplomats at the United Nations complained of being taken for granted by a low-level, low-energy U.S. campaign for the rights-commission seat.

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The president strolled in nonchalantly, more than a half-hour late -- as he did at his own end-of-term speech at the Democratic Convention a few weeks earlier. Some old diplomatic hands weren't sure whether they should be more upset at the arrogance of the president or the subservience of the U.N. leaders who waited for him to start. "We wouldn't have waited more than five minutes," former Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar was overheard complaining.

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Why does the United States oppose a way to punish the world's greatest villains? In short -- and in no uncertain terms -- congressmen such as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms demand that no such court have jurisdiction over potential American criminals.

U.S. efforts to impede the court's development are the latest in a series of American slaps to the United Nations, such as the refusal to pay membership dues, leaving many international observers appalled. Law professor Christopher L. Blakesley of Louisiana State University speaks for many foreign affairs specialists when he characterizes the U.S. approach to the ICC. "From the first, it has been embarrassing, pathetic and nefarious."

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Also assembled were authors Robert A. Heinlein and Poul Anderson, retired Gen. Daniel O. Graham, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and aerospace industry luminaries in the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy, a group that apparently wrote parts of President Reagan's 1983 Star Wars speech. "We were gathered to build a space program, with costs and schedules, to submit to Ronald Reagan via his science advisor. We generated the Space Defense Initiative (or 'Star Wars' if you didn't like it.)"

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Market prices dropped last week because they were over-inflated and that's what balloons do when you prick them. Greenspan helped play the role of the prick this time by threatening to hike interest rates, shaking a sensitive market uneasy about the possibility of a court-ordered split-up of Microsoft. Investors panicked, and sold as if they had some massive belated realization that most dot-com stocks have the same intrinsic value as Confederate scrip.

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King's work necessarily suffers from O'Brian's almost total refusal to cooperate. Unlike most public figures who become the subject of such an endeavor, O'Brian remained, almost to the end of his very long life, such a recluse that a biographer has few outside sources to set against the novelist's own, as it turns out, almost entirely fictional version of his life. King completed the book before O'Brian died in January, and his epilogue barely catches up with the event.

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O'Brian's fans declare that his work will live forever, but perhaps the most fascinating reading will be his own life story, which he had crafted as a fiction believed almost to the end by most reviewers and readers. Working as an honored guest at Trinity College, Dublin, for the last two years, he was recently awarded an honorary doctorate as a credit to Irish letters -- despite the fact that he'd adopted his name and his nom de plume, Patrick O'Brian, along with his Irishness, with no great claim to either.

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