I had started to write a mean, snarky post about Lynne Finney, the USAID diplomat who said John Bolton made her sell formula to starving Africans because Nestle was a big company. (Here’s the Dog Trainer’s account of her accusations.) I followed the Corner’s link to her rainbow-hued website and clicked on some of the floating butterfly icons. Her New-Age meditation practice will soon become legend if the likes of Mark Steyn light into her, and I expect the sharper wits of the right-leaning blogosphere will not spare her. She’s low-hanging fruit, and I suspect that the backlash from her accusation will discredit the Democratic efforts to smear Bolton (“Look how they’re scraping the barrel to find something to throw at this guy!”)

The really, I don’t know, odd thing here is in her bio page. It sounds like she actually does some good work in helping people come to terms with abuse and learn to respect themselves. However, she describes her career in this way:

Lynne has created many realities for herself as diplomat, United Nations policy advisor to the Agency for International Development, and a professor at law schools in Washington, D.C., California and Utah.

Among those ” realities she has created” seems to be a recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse by her father. Recovered memories are tricky things and are often are the result of suggestion implanted by zealous questioners. The Gerald Amirault case was precisely such an example of false memories of abuse dredged up by prosecution psychologists. In fact it’s rare that such memories of abuse are repressed; the opposite is usually true–people can’t forget or ignore such memories.

In the meantime, Finney seems to be “creating a new reality” about John Bolton, or perhaps one has been suggested to her.

UPDATE: Ms. Finney’s accusations come just a little too late for Mark Steyn to address them–seeing as his Sun-Times column today is a veritable Sizzler of hearty red meat about Bolton, and too much more would leave us bloated and burpy. He inveighs against the Voinosquich Republicans who are, unlike the Butterfly Lady, a real threat to Bolton:

The rap against John Bolton is that he gets annoyed with do-nothing bureaucrats. If that’s enough to disqualify you from government service, then 70 percent of citizens who’ve visited the DMV in John Kerry’s Massachusetts are ineligible. Sinking Bolton means handing a huge psychological victory to a federal bureaucracy that so spectacularly failed America on 9/11 and to a U.N. bureaucracy eager for any distraction from its own mess.

I am pleased to see Steyn concur in my comparison between the Benedict XVI nomination and the Bolton confirmation, although Steyn runs with it:

Unlike the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the conclave of cardinals takes its job seriously. They understand the demands of the New York Times: women priests, gay sex, condoms for all. But, as befits an ancient institution, they take the long view: They think that radical secularism is weak and that the consequences of its weakness will prove dangerous and possibly fatal for the Western world. Therefore, there’s no point accommodating it — and, after all, those churches that do (the Episcopalians, for example) are already in steep decline. You can disagree with this, particularly if you’re as shrill and parochial as Pope Benedict’s American critics. But the conclave at least addressed the big issues.

Now is a gut check for the Right, all across the board. These are simply tests of whether or not we believe our own rhetoric. College of Cardinals gets a pass. Senators? Whether you do or not, your constituents do. And we’re watching you.

Captain Ed says Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen are out of committee. The showdown over the nuclear option appears imminent.

I had been thinking that the GOP was waiting for a Supreme Court nomination to unleash the big guns. I may have given GOP leaders too much credit. The Los Angeles Times reports that big business is wary of having the Senate shut down, because of all their priorities that might get put on hold. And Frist is worried about that.

Never mind that solid federal courts would be good for big business. The real point is that Frist and Co. have been dithering. Now that Brown and Owens are out of committee, that will have to change. And that’s a good thing.

Kevin Murphy (via Jim Lindgren at Volokh) has a good post about who really wrote Roe v. Wade.

You thought it was Justice Blackmun? How naive. . .