Critics want to know why 'bloodthirsty warmonger' John Bolton is still invited on TV

Anti-war advocates on Tuesday denounced the corporate media for giving former National Security Adviser John Bolton—a longtime proponent of regime change and U.S. military action around the world—a platform to discuss his views on the current tension in Ukraine.

MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell invited the former official for the Trump and George W. Bush administrations to discuss how President Joe Biden should confront Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent escalation of tensions.

"We really, really don't need John Bolton's opinions on a new war."

Bolton said that amid news that the Russian Parliament has authorized the use of military force and Putin issued new demands that Ukraine recognize Russia's claim to Crimea and that the West end weapons shipments there, the Biden administration must swiftly take aggressive action against Putin.

The White House's "gradual escalation" of sanctions against Russia is an "admission of a disastrous failure of policy," Bolton told Mitchell.

"Reminder," tweeted Sarah Reese Jones of Politicus USA. "John Bolton is a neo-con whose foreign policy has been consistently proven wrong. He was wrong about Iraq. He has been wrong about the Middle East. He was wrong about Afghanistan."

Bolton's comments came shortly before Biden announced the White House is joining the European Union in imposing a first round of sanctions against Russian individuals and groups in response to Putin's official recognition of the self-proclaimed people's republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

Biden announced sanctions against two financial institutions, sovereign debt, and elite individuals in Russia Tuesday afternoon, calling them the "first tranche" of U.S. sanctions and saying the country could take more action if Russian forces advance further into Ukraine.

Bolton advised the White House to "bring the guillotine down on all the sanctions they've been contemplating and take additional steps" in order to avoid further military action by Russia, adding that the U.S. should have placed more troops in Ukraine several months ago.

"I think we should have had more American forces in Ukraine, not to fight the Russians but to train with the Ukrainians, and to show those Russian generals looking across the border and seeing American flags," Bolton told Mitchell. "Biden took that off the table, saying there would be no American forces involved, and he got nothing for it."

Considering Bolton's record as a war hawk who aggressively pushed the false claim that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 invasion of the country, urged former President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal against the advice of international experts, and urged regime change in Venezuela, critics including Win Without War called on media outlets to "STOP giving John Bolton airtime."

"Why is this person on my TV?" asked Andrew Lawrence of Media Matters for America, while podcast host Kyle Kulinski called Bolton "literally the last person on earth who should be giving foreign policy advice right now."

Mehdi Hasan, who also hosts a political news show on MSNBC, warned last week that media outlets that interview Bolton amid flaring tensions in Ukraine must at least "ask him some tough questions."

"We really, really don't need John Bolton's opinions on a new war," Hasan tweeted.