This little nugget in a Politico story on problems the new SecState may face in filling vacant positions should be a reminder of where the State Department stands with the conservative side of Washington politics.
If Pompeo were to try to [appoint to State Department positions] GOP critics of Trump, he “needs to argue to the president that some people are terrible ‘Never Trumpers’ but others just supported other candidates so they naturally attacked him just as he very strongly attacked his opponent,” a Republican former government official said.
“The key difference is probably what people have said since he got elected: If they have stayed critical, the hell with them. If they have been supportive for a year and a half, they should be forgiven, because Pompeo needs some of them to take control of State back from the awful, horrible State bureaucracy.”
The State Department does not have any reserve of good will to draw on with GOP officials. It just doesn't. That's been the case for as long as I can remember, and probably much longer that that. Bear it in mind, and temper any expectations you may have that the new boss will fight the administration's plans to cut the foreign affairs budget and to implement its own policy agenda.
CHICAGO (CBS) – The Deputy Consul General of Israel to the Midwest, Itay Milner, says he was ten minutes into his Uber ride on Lower Wacker Drive Thursday night when he was thrown out by the driver.
Milner wrote in a Facebook post, “I just had the worst experience of my life. I was just thrown out of an Uber in the middle of the highway only because I answered my phone in my mother tongue.”
He adds, “Ten minutes into my ride with no prior interaction between the driver and myself, it took only two words in Hebrew to get my driver [to] start yelling at me ‘Get the $#@* out of my car!'”
He continued: “It did not help when I told him that I can’t go out in the middle of the highway. It was like I wasn’t a person for him anymore. When I asked him if it’s because I’m speaking Hebrew he said yes and kept yelling at me to get out. I am not easily intimidated, but that scared me and I ran out of there, walking in the middle of the road.
“I never thought something like this could happen in America, such awful racism. This cannot be tolerated!”
The new SecState introduced himself yesterday in a ceremony that lasted only 12 minutes from limo to walk-off. And, as we’ve heard over and over, it was all about restoring the State Department’s swagger.
I’m not sure how the new SecState means that, but the definition of “swagger” in Webster’s doesn’t sound so good:
swaggered; swaggering play \ˈswa-g(ə-)riŋ\
intransitive verb
1 : to conduct oneself in an arrogant or superciliously pompous manner; especially : to walk with an air of overbearing self-confidence
2 : boast, brag
transitive verb
: to force by argument or threat : bully
“Swagger” is meant to be an antonym for “Tillerson” I suppose. We’ll see how that works out. Personally, I distrust all Congressmen, including former ones. The new SecState has a history of dealing with the State Department during his career in Congress, and judging by some of it, people might come to miss Silent Rex someday.
Well, I’m just going to blurt it out. That new SecState’s swaggering introduction of himself was a VIAGRA® ad. There, I’ve said it. And now that I’ve said “VIAGRA®” on the internet I’ll get lots of spam mail from places like Hong Kong, but so be it.
A VIAGRA® ad, yes, but which kind of VIAGRA® ad was it? There are two kinds. The male-focused ones like those “this is the age of knowing” commercials with cowboyed-up middle-aged men doing manly stuff, and the female-focused ones that feature The Pose.
You know the pose: Her stomach’s on the mattress, she’s resting on her elbows, and her feet might be kicked up in the air. It’s the “We need to talk about your boner” pose.
Which is it? Are we to be rowdied up or guilted into getting our swagger back?
** Warning ** Ask your doctor if your heart is healthy enough for swaggering. Side effects may include headaches, flushing, upset stomach, and abnormal vision. Seek immediate medical help for a swagger lasting more than four hours.
Yeah, the second trailer for the Chappaquiddick movie uses that old Donovan lyric (way down below the ocean, where I want to be, she may be), and that might seem heavy-handed except it perfectly suits the subject.
The film, released last week, has been rated PG-13
for, among other reasons, depictions of "historical smoking." Okay, we don't want young children to see how it was once common for Americans to smoke. A few other themes in the movie that may also be inappropriate for younger audiences include drunk driving, negligent homicide, manslaughter, abuse of power, aiding and abetting, public corruption, cowardice, misogyny, classism, and the kind of self-absorbed survivalism that enabled Senator Ted Kennedy to escape from a sinking car without a moment’s hesitation. Of course, Teddy had a lot more experience with drunk driving than the 28-year old passenger he left behind, Mary Jo Kopechne, and maybe that accounts for his greater presence of mind when the car spun around and water rushed inside.
It's not an Untold True Story, as I've recently seen it referred to, because the story has been told before, especially in the 1988 book Senatorial Privilege (see the NYT book review here}.
The Successfully Suppressed and Largely Forgotten True Story would be more like it. I'm acquainted with a few 40-ish people who have worked in Washington for the Feds all their adult lives but never knew anything about the Chappaquiddick incident until now. The 50-ish and 60-ish people knew, however.
There was a remarkable fictional treatment by Joyce Carol Oates in 1992, Black Water, which is told entirely in the mind of the victim as she dies, and whose two-hour reading time corresponds with the time it likely took for Kopechne to die. Read the NYT review of that book here: "Her Thoughts While Drowning."
From the review:
Everything we learn comes to us in the moments just after the accident, Kelly's last moments alive, as she discovers that she's pinned in the car, as she refuses to believe that the Senator will not come back for her -- that he has in fact used her body for support to get out of the sinking vehicle -- and as she struggles to keep her head in the air bubble that was created as the car sank. Because we know the history, we know the outcome, and, in any case, Ms. Oates keeps it well focused. As the book draws to its conclusion, the refrain "As the black water filled her lungs, and she died" is repeated with very much the same frequency, and engenders much the same feeling of cathartic recognition, that one experiences hearing the choruses of the ancient Greek tragedies.
"She saw that. There was no mistake. Yet at the same time she was explaining to a gathering of people, elders, whose faces were indistinct through the cracked windshield that it was not what they thought ... he had not abandoned her to die in the black water ...
But, of course, he had.
The Chappaquiddick film is the only account of the incident since Oates' novel that pays attention to the victim who was sacrificed to Ted Kennedy's political career. In interviews, the film makers have said they wanted to depict Mary Jo Kopechne as a real, rounded, person, and not just as that school graduation photo that is all the public has ever seen of her.
That yearbook photo. Doesn't any other photo of her exist? Did no one take a photo of her between that class graduation and her 28th year? Evidently not, at least so far as we know. That photo was a ghostly presence that hung over Ted Kennedy's career for forty years after Kopechne's death. Only now, a decade after his own death, is she coming into definition.
Clinton offered some rather unvarnished remarks in India this weekend that sound a lot like her “deplorables” commentary from September 2016. She played up the states that supported her as more economically advanced than the states that voted for Trump, calling them “dynamic” and “moving forward.” Then she again suggested Trump supporters were motivated by animosity toward women and people of color.
“If you look at the map of the United States, there's all that red in the middle where Trump won,” Clinton said. “I win the coast. I win, you know, Illinois and Minnesota — places like that.”
“If you look at the map of the United States, there's all that red in the middle where Trump won,” Clinton said. “I win the coast. I win, you know, Illinois and Minnesota — places like that.”
She went on: “But what the map doesn't show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
Well, something else you can see in the election map is that lots of places that went for Obama in 2012 went for Trump in 2016. You can see them in this November 2016 NPR story with 3 charts that show "where the Trump surge happened and the places that flipped from supporting President Obama in 2012 to going for the Republican nominee and billionaire real-estate mogul just four years later."
Maybe I missed it, but how does Hillary account for those optimistic, diverse, dynamic, etc., etc., pro-Obama places of 2012 that turned into redneck Hicksvilles in 2016?
Here's a thought. Could it be that Hillary was just an unlikable person and terrible candidate who did not offer anything of much appeal to states with a majority of the Electoral College vote?
When I saw the news today about President Trump dismissing Silent Rex, my first thought was that the decision might have been precipitated by his press release of yesterday about the killing of a Russian ex-spy in Britain, since that statement differed from one released by the White House.
The United States was in touch with our Allies in the United Kingdom ahead of today’s announcement, including in a call between Secretary Tillerson and Foreign Secretary Johnson this morning. We have full confidence in the UK’s investigation and its assessment that Russia was likely responsible for the nerve agent attack that took place in Salisbury last week.
There is never a justification for this type of attack – the attempted murder of a private citizen on the soil of a sovereign nation – and we are outraged that Russia appears to have again engaged in such behavior. From Ukraine to Syria – and now the UK – Russia continues to be an irresponsible force of instability in the world, acting with open disregard for the sovereignty of other states and the life of their citizens.
We agree that those responsible – both those who committed the crime and those who ordered it – must face appropriately serious consequences. We stand in solidarity with our Allies in the United Kingdom and will continue to coordinate closely our responses.
All questions of that particular killing and our response to it aside, how can any official USG statement say "there is never a justification for this type of attack – the attempted murder of a private citizen on the soil of a sovereign nation?" Targeted killings are still targeted killings whether a nation does them with up close with poison or from far away with armed drones.
The press reported how Obama decided whom to kill with the aid of a 'disposition matrix.' Here's a handy flowchart that spells out the Obama administration's justifications for the killing of private citizens on the soil of sovereign nations. The Trump administration presumably does the same.
But, but, didn't Obama have magic bombs that never killed the wrong person? Actually, no, as the Obama White House admitted in 2016, its drone strikes had killed 64 individuals conclusively determined to be non-combatants, in addition to 52 individuals whose status remained in doubt. Private monitoring organizations such as the Long War Journal, the New America Foundation, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, have estimated there were several times that number of non-combatant casualties.
Personally, I support the use of targeted killing in at least some cases. And, if the USG wants to issue threats to Putin and demand consequences for the attack in the U.K., that's also okay by me.
But, so long as the USG conducts such attacks itself, please spare us the sanctimony.
