Chronos
December 11, 2011, 9:31pm
21
At the time, a lot of pundits said that they believed that Iraq had WMDs, since there was no chance that any President could be so brazen as to say what Bush was saying if it weren’t true. These pundits turned out to have an unpleasant surprise in store for them.
Little_Nemo:
I disagree. While you could justifiably accuse Bush of many flaws, he showed no signs of racism or sexism. His problem was he had no interest in ideological diversity. But as long as you were a pro-business conservative, he didn’t care what color, gender, or religion you were.
Concur. Few people think GWB was a worse president than I do. That said it is unfair to ding him for racism and sexism when he never showed any inclinations that way.
Euphonious_Polemic:
Please re-post this the next time some idjit goes on and on about how “well the democrats voted for the war in Iraq, so they’re just as much at fault as the Bush administration”.
Lying to Senators in order to get them to vote for a war. Freaking astounding.
WEeellll…
cough Gulf of Tonkin cough
Freaking astounding that they keep falling for it.
Ravenman:
So perhaps we’d see Doug Feith as Secretary of Defense, Donald Trump as Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Bremmer as Secretary of State, Bob Ney as Chief of Staff, and so on…
Education Secretary Sarah Palin…
I was thinking white pine.
I’m getting a vision of the Council of Thirteen from the Guild of Calamitous Intent.
Can’t find a worthwhile image to link to, though…
DrumBum
December 12, 2011, 7:11pm
28
I had her penciled in as the Secretary of Energy, given her detailed knowledge of the oil & gas industry.
There would be no Republican cabinet, because it is now appropriate for Democrats to filibuster the nominee for every single cabinet seat on the basis that a Republican was elected president.
Empty, unless you’re a millionaire.
Not Secretary of State? I mean, she can see Russia from where she lives.
Probably businessmen who would see it as their main goal to make their department ineffectual. A head of the oil and gas industry as interior secretary, a union buster as labor secretary, a pharmaceutical company head as HHS secretary, Rick Perry as Education secretary etc.
TruCelt
December 13, 2011, 6:02pm
33
Not sure, but I’m betting Newt’s would have a false bottom.
Lobohan:
Yeah, John Bolton. I tell you the only thing I like in Secretary of State pick more than a subnormal IQ, is seething hatred of other countries.
Choosing Bolton is a shout-out to the people stupid enough to vote for Newt.
I’d find the comic book artist John Bolton, give him a fake mustache and a vocal coach to sound Amurrican, and appoint him–before I’d appoint John Bolton.
Lobohan:
Yeah, John Bolton. I tell you the only thing I like in Secretary of State pick more than a subnormal IQ, is seething hatred of other countries.
Choosing Bolton is a shout-out to the people stupid enough to vote for Newt.
Would it be ok if he only hated the countries that hate us?
Definitely not. That’s not a diplomat’s job.
Jas09
December 14, 2011, 3:15pm
37
No. You cannot function diplomatically if you hate the person (or worse, the entire people) you are negotiating with.
Why Newt Gingrich Hates the State Department:
Why does Gingrich harbor such strange antipathy for the nonpartisan, apolitical analysts in Foggy Bottom?
It is an often overlooked aspect of Gingrich’s history that he was a leading advocate of the disastrous Iraq War. In April 2003 he delivered at broadside against the State Department at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. (USA Today described Gingrich at the time as “a close associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.”) The State Department produced honest intelligence assessments in the run-up to the invasion, rather than the politicized fear mongering about imaginary weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda that the Bush-Cheney White House wanted. Secretary of State Colin Powell was also more cautious about invading Iraq than his colleagues in the White House and Defense Department.
In June 2003 Gingrich wrote an article for Foreign Policy that scathingly attacked the State Department for failing to back the Iraq invasion. FP’s Josh Keating recounts that Gingrich’s piece “accused the department of undermining the Bush administration’s foreign policy and argues that it needs to ‘experience culture shock, a top-to-bottom transformation that will make it a more effective communicator of U.S. values around the world.’ ” As Keating notes, “Published just weeks after Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech, the piece feels a like a bit of a relic of the short-lived triumphalism of the early Iraq war.” Gingrich’s recent statements suggest he has not rethought his discredited worldview.
The ideological roots of Gingrich’s views go back quite a bit farther than 2003. “It’s a critique we’ve heard periodically from the right since the McCarthy witch hunts,” says Jeffrey Laurenti an expert on international affairs at the Century Foundation. “They want to ensure that only people loyal to supposed ‘Americanist’ values work in the State Department and that it should not be contaminated by understanding the way others think.”
When implemented, these ideological purges have damaged the effectiveness of the State Department and American foreign policy. “It blinded American policymakers to what was happening in China [in the late 1940s and early 1950s],” says Laurenti. According to Laurenti, John Foster Dulles chased out the analysts who best understood the civil war that was going on China because their correct analysis, that the communists would win, was not what politicians wanted to hear. Some would argue that the resulting chilling effect on the way civil servants approached their job had terrible reverberations in years to come, possibly causing Washington to misunderstand the situation in Vietnam in the 1960s by believing that Hanoi was a puppet of Beijing. “This is a formula for blinding America’s leadership to what is happening on the outside,” says Laurenti. “When the State Department has been cowed by the political class in Washington to not report what it sees, we’ve had catastrophic failures: not just China in ‘49, but Iran in ’78–’79.”
Who should I vote for if I want Glenn Beck as Secretary of Propaganda?
Jas09
December 14, 2011, 4:15pm
40
Not Newt - Beck thinks that if you vote for Newt you’re a racist.
And Beck is a Mormon… so I think Romney is your best bet for a Beck nomination.
