Today, President Obama will bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, John Bolton criticized the president’s judgment:

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s award, to be officially bestowed tomorrow, has centered on Ms. Robinson’s central organizing role as secretary general of the 2001 “World Conference Against Racism” in Durban, South Africa. Instead of concentrating on its purported objectives, Durban was virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and at least implicitly anti-American.

Bolton then added that:

Ms. Robinson’s award shows Mr. Obama’s detachment from longstanding, mainstream, American public opinion on foreign policy. The administration’s tin ear to the furor over Ms. Robinson underlines how deep that detachment really is.

In today’s New York Daily News, Rabbi Abraham Cooper wonders what the president was thinking with his selection:

Robinson just doesn’t get it. Global human rights dialogue has been debased on her watch . . . Global human rights have yet to recover from Robinson’s Durban debacle.

Charles Lane, in the Washington Post online, explains his own opposition to Robinson’s medal:

My objection to Robinson is a bit different. By law, the medal is supposed to go to those who have made “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” I just don’t think Robinson, though an accomplished civil rights lawyer in her youth, a skilled self-promoter and a fixture at global confabs, has done anything especially meritorious in those areas, much less meritorious enough to outweigh the troubling part of her record.