Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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DiMarco's Daughter

Rich Galen

Monday April 11, 2005

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Professional golfer Chris DiMarco lost the Masters yesterday to Tiger Woods on the first hole of a sudden death play-off.

I am not a golfer. I used to say - USED to say - that I didn't understand how you could spend four or five hours doing something like playing golf. But that was before I bought season tickets to the new baseball team here in Your Nation's Capital - the Nationals - who play at RFK stadium which is where I plan to spend the vast majority of the 81 home games.

In the seven PGA tournaments he entered in 2005 prior to the Masters, Mr. DiMarco earned $785,278. Not bad considering he earned zero at the Players Championship and the Bell South Classic after finishing 117th and 152nd respectively.

Having overcome a three-stroke deficit and finishing regulation in a major tournament tied with Tiger puts Mr. DiMarco in pretty rare company. I believe he may be the only person to have ever done it.

But that's not the point. Mr. DiMarco has three children. One of them is a one-ish daughter. During the obligatory post-match interview ("What does battling Tiger to a tie tell you about yourself?") he was holding his daughter. The baby didn't much care about Tiger's holing out a pitch-and-run on the 16th. She cared a VERY, VERY LOT about the microphone with the really swell CBS logo on it.

Baby DiMarco kept reaching for the mike. The interviewer kept trying to pull it away from her while keeping it in front of Daddy DiMarco's mouth.

It was great television.

Memo to CBS: You should instruct your hard-edged golf interviewers that if the second-place golfer is holding a one-year-old baby in his arms and the one-year-old baby is grabbing for the microphone the hard-edged interviewer shouldn't look irritated - HE didn't just lose the Masters - he should, instead, ask the one-year-old how proud she (or he) is of her (or his) daddy.

Dope.

On a slightly different topic, the Senate confirmation hearing on the nomination of John Bolton to be the US Ambassador to the United Nations is scheduled to begin today and the Left doesn't like him.

The shocking headline of the week is the following: "State Department to Back Bolton Nomination to UN."

Am I missing something? Doesn't the State Department HAVE to back the nomination of John Bolton because the John Bolton is the pick of the President of the United States for whom - at least on paper - the employees of the State Department are supposed to work?

Maybe not.

John Bolton believes that the US representative to the United Nations should represent the interests of the US. You would think that was more-or-less a given, but you would be modestly incorrect.

The best UN Ambassadors the past 30 years have been George H.W. Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (later Democratic Senator from New York) and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

Ms. Kirkpatrick was the person who called the Left wing of the Democratic party the "Blame America First Crowd," (which still fits) and was quoted as saying, "What takes place in the [United Nations] Security Council more closely resembles a mugging than either a political debate or an effort at problem-solving."

To draw a modest distinction, one of the UN Ambassadors appointed by President Clinton was the current Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson. Richardson's principal contribution to US interests at the UN was to interview Monica Lewinsky for a job at the UN when Senior White House staffers were trying to get her as far away from Clinton as they could.

The Democrats in the Senate would do well to consider the political costs of a full-court press against John Bolton.

The United Nations is not held in particularly high regard among rank-and-file Americans right now and a clever Conservative organization might well produce some advertisements suggesting that those who oppose Bolton are choosing the anti-American policies of Secretary-General Kofi Annan over the interests of the United States.

I'm not saying that's the right thing to do. I'm just saying that it could happen.

Where do I send my check?

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