At his rally yesterday in Elkhart, Indiana, President Trump gave an impressionistic account of how my good friends in the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations fitted out "a big, beautiful corner" of the consular annex building in the Arnona neighborhood of Jerusalem to serve as an interim office for the Ambassador, and did so at a reasonable cost.
Notice the sustained applause when Trump mentions how the best site in the city has setback distance.
"It’s set back. Which is good for safety ... It’s a big site, big setback – they want setback for safety, makes sense."
Three cheers for setback! It's about time it got some recognition.
According to this informative administrative timeline of the Department of State by the Office of the Historian, one of the earliest laws the Congress passed concerning the State Department was the Logan Act.
January 30, 1799:
“An act for the punishment of certain crimes therein specified” (the Logan Act, 1 Stat. 613) conferred upon the Department of State the exclusive right to engage in negotiations with foreign governments.
The Act was passed following the unauthorized peace negotiations of one George Logan, a Pennsylvania state legislator and Quaker, with France.
The Logan Act was last updated in 1994, so I assume it's not just a quaint relic of the 18th Century, and violation of the Act is a felony. But, so far as I can tell, no one has ever been prosecuted for violating it. John Kerry probably won't be the first. Probably.
I hadn't seen this news before, but the UK Daily Mail has the U.S. Treasury Department's OIG report of investigation into the incident, which they obtained via a FOIA request. From the report it appears that DSS agents substantiated the victim's accusation based upon a preponderance of the evidence, and the Treasury Department OIG "determined that it is more likely than not that (the woman’s) version of the event is more accurate and that the sexual act was not consensual ... Also it is likely that (the woman) was too intimidated and scared to forcefully resist (the attaché’s) advances."
Despite that determination, "the U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, declined to prosecute the case, citing the ‘exacting standard of proof’ in criminal court." The lesser standard used in civil litigation should be met, I would think, so a lawsuit or two might be coming.
The former Attaché's name and the post at which this occurred are both being withheld. We know only that he was a GS-13, and the incident happened in a Western Hemisphere post on January 1, 2014.
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.
