Panic at the State Department

Good day all. Last Friday, the New York Slimes posted an Op-Ed on significant morale problems at the United States Department of State. It seems that thousands of State Department employees are concerned with Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

These professional diplomats are worried that their combined many decades of experience is being ignored by the President and his Secretary of State. They are aghast that they aren’t being asked for their opinions on how to deal with foreign governments. Many positions haven’t been filled and many employees are leaving. Here are the details from the New York Slimes’s Richard Cohen:

On the first Friday in May, Foreign Affairs Day, the staff gathers in the flag-bedecked C Street lobby of the State Department beside the memorial plaques for the 248 members of foreign affairs agencies who have lost their lives in the line of duty. A moment of silence is observed. As president of the American Foreign Service Association, Barbara Stephenson helps organize the annual event. This year, she was set to enter a delegates’ lounge to brief Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on its choreography before appearing alongside him. Instead, she told me, she was shoved out of the room.

Stephenson, a former ambassador to Panama, is not used to being manhandled at the State Department she has served with distinction for more than three decades. She had been inclined to give Tillerson the benefit of the doubt. Transitions between administrations are seldom smooth, and Tillerson is a Washington neophyte, unversed in diplomacy, an oilman trying to build a relationship with an erratic boss, President Trump.

In other words, he’s someone who is putting into effect the President’s agenda and isn’t paying any attention at all to the Striped Pants Brigade. And the answer to this “problem” from the snobs?

An exodus is underway. Those who have departed include Nancy McEldowney, the director of the Foreign Service Institute until she retired last month, who described to me “a toxic, troubled environment and organization”; Dana Shell Smith, the former ambassador to Qatar, who said what was most striking was the “complete and utter disdain for our expertise”; and Jake Walles, a former ambassador to Tunisia with some 35 years of experience. “There’s just a slow unraveling of the institution,” he told me.

Aww, isn’t that just to bad? All these pointy headed leftists who put everyone else ahead of the United States are suddenly at a loss. They now have someone, a whole administration of someones, who are putting America first, Making America Great Again, and telling the globalists to take a long walk off a short pier. Oh the HORRORS!!

The 8,000 Foreign Service officers are not sure how to defend American values under a president who has entertained the idea of torture, shown contempt for the Constitution, and never met an autocrat who failed to elicit his sympathy.

Excuse me? I thought Barack Obama was no longer the President of the United States.

The president signaled early on that military might, not diplomatic deftness, was his thing. Soft power was for the birds. This worldview (in essence no more than Trump’s gut) has been expressed in a proposed cut of about 30 percent in the State Department budget as military spending soars; a push to eliminate some 2,300 jobs; the vacancy of many senior posts, including 20 of the 22 assistant secretary positions requiring Senate confirmation; unfilled ambassadorships — roughly 30 percent of the total — from Paris to New Delhi; and the brushoff of the department’s input in interagency debate and in pivotal decisions, like withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

The reasons for this dismemberment are unclear.

No it isn’t. It’s perfectly clear.

Is it punishment for Hillary Clinton’s department?

In part, yes.

Or an extreme iteration of the “deconstruction of the administrative state” sought by Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon?

Not really, The State Department doesn’t have that much regulatory authority and what it does have, it probably shouldn’t have in the first place.

Does it reflect the priorities of Trump’s base or White House suspicion of the “deep state” or the president’s love of generals?

President Trump like Generals because they know how to get things done. The State Department’s Professional Diplomats are only good at attending parties, flying around the world attending meetings of no importance in very expensive locations, and agreeing to foreign deals designed to hurt America and Americans.

All these factors appear to play a part. The upshot is a radical militarization of American foreign policy, and that’s dangerous.

Yes, from the perspective of a pantywaist barking moonbat proglodyte who’s sole purpose for years has been the suborning of American sovereignty to the United Nations and the European Union, I can see why they would think it was dangerous.

Tillerson, who declined my request for an interview and whose spokesman never responded to calls and an email, insists he knows what he’s about.

And why would Secretary of State Tillerson want to talk to an Elitist, proglodyte like you. He knows that anything he said would be twisted completely out of context.

The secretary has hired two consulting groups, Deloitte and Insigniam, to carry out a complete reorganization of the State Department next year.

Uh oh! He’s bringing in the Bobs from Office Space!!

A survey went out to all employees; the process is very deliberate. Those empty name slots down the ghostly seventh-floor corridors may remain empty until mid-2018.

Or forever? That would work for me.

“The unanswered question with the cuts is: to what end?” McEldowney said. Another senior official, who has since left, pressed Tillerson for direction and was told: “It’s very simple. End terrorism. End radicalization. Deal with China.”

And Make America Great Again of course.

On May 3, in his one town-hall meeting with the department staff, Tillerson declared, “If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests.”

In other words, it’s time to stop morons like you from trying to be Imperialistic and demanding that everyone do as you say. We aren’t dealing with Americans and we can’t expect them to think like Americans. Of course, the Striped Pants Brigade in the State Department also has a serious problem with thinking like Americans. Most of them prefer to think like the French or the Belgians.

This suggested Tillerson’s acquiescence to the valueless, transactional foreign policy emerging from the White House, a zero-sum game in which “Pay up” is the constant admonition to allies — and forget about any shining city on a hill.

Oh No! How dare those people? They actually expect foreign governments that agree to certain levels of funding for things like defense to actually keep their promises?

It’s hard to overstate how disturbing this is for many in the State Department.

It’s disturbing to them because they are nothing more then a bunch of over-paid, over-educated blowhards who think that the best way to handle anything is to let the United Nations, The European Union and some tinpot Third world dictator tell us what to do.

As Daniel Fried, another former ambassador who left this year, said upon his departure, “Values have power.”

Actually, no, they don’t. Now machine guns on the other hand…

Asked about the situation at the State Department, Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, told me: “Our interests in the end rest on our values. I am concerned because the country seems to be veering away from values that are so foundational for us.”

Like anyone actually cares what Colin Powell thinks? He was the idiot who convinced President George H.W. Bush not to wipe out the Iraqi Army in the first Gulf war, which led to the Second Gulf War.

David Rank, the top American diplomat in China who quit last month over Trump’s decision to leave the Paris climate agreement, echoed that: “It’s disturbing to have an administration so nakedly uninterested in our values.”

I think the general attitude of the State Department “Diplomats” can be summed up quite easily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_8YTa_-hZw

For decades, the United States Department of State has been very good at promoting everything BUT the Interests of the United States of America. From my perspective, the last decent State Department employee was The Diplomad, and he retired due to ill health. He was sick of Felonia von Pantsuit. The best thing that can happen will be the gutting of that pack of self important scum.

Recently, Russia ordered some 755 “Diplomats” out of the country, apparently bringing the number down to about what they have here. Well, since this bunch really isn’t needed, I would recommend thanking them for their service and showing them the door. If that happens, you can bet your bottom dollar that the New York Slimes and the Washington ComPost) will scream that this was a plan cooked up by Trump and Putin to hurt those poor hard working layabout professional diplomats. To that I say…

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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