Could I have that in English, please?

I want smart people in government (local, state, and national). I would hope they would be smarter than me (not a very difficult task), but accessible and able to communicate how their participation in government is going to make our lives better, or at least no worse. I think they call it "vision".

So, I'm all for John Bolton, he seems a straight-shooter, a conservative, and more importantly, George W. Bush wants him to be our U.N. Ambassador. Hey, that's good enough for me. Plus, from what I've read and also, from hearing him speak on TV, he definitely seems a smart government employee. However, I'm not so sure about the communication part. Check out this sentence from an article Bolton wrote in 1998 on Edmund Burke

... Among those are his reliance on the accretion of experience and reasoning from empirical reality, his abhorrence of elevating abstract principles into a theology, and his fear of driving policy on the basis of metaphysics.

Say What!?

Oh well, his duties won't require him to address Kentucky rubes like me, so I guess it's okay that I don't have a clue what metaphysics-based policy is. Read the whole piece here with a tip o' the hat to Blogs for Bush