The Dysfunction of _____'s State Department Is Stunning

I have always said that it might be good to rid the halls of Washington, or any government building, of career politicians, because most of them haven’t really done very well by We The People lo these last couple of hundred years.

But, I also said, as recently as 2016, when _____ was running for office, that he wasn’t quite the non-politician I was looking for; I asked people who supported him if they truly believed an ALLEGED billionaire had the best interests of the middle and lower classes at heart when it was clear he’d never done a single thing for them while a private citizen.

But I did hope—I’m a bit of a Pollyanna in that way—that he’d try to surround himself with people who know how government works, and that he’d listen to them. But then he appointed billionaires with no public service under their belts, like Rex Tillerson, or billionaires who donated heavily to his campaign, like Betsy DeVos, so I knew this was bound to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and yeah, I, and We The People, have been proven right.

Take the State Department, for example. At a recent press briefing, Tracy Wilkinson, from the LA Times, asked State spokesperson Mark Toner what the plans were for Mexico’s foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, who was in Washington:

WILKINSON: Hi, yes, thank you. Hi Mark. I see that the foreign minister of Mexico is in town, Luis Videgaray, meeting with—according to the Mexicans—Kusher, Gary Cohn and McMaster. Is there no State Department meeting with him? And if not, why not?

MARK TONER: Tracy, good question. We’ll take that and get back to you. I was unaware that he was—the foreign minister was in town. And I’m not sure—I can’t speak to whether there’s going to be any meetings at the State Department at any level.

Toner had no idea that a key foreign dignitary was in Washington DC, much less in this country. Seriously; our next door neighbor, the country that _____ has promised will pay for a ridiculous wall, sends its foreign minister to America and the State Department doesn’t know about it? Well, that’s not entirely true, because Tracy Wilkinson did some follow-up reporting, and found out that Videgaray had called Secretary of State Rex Tillerson personally to tell him he was visiting.

Now, to be fair, the visit was planned entirely through the White House, and Videgaray did not schedule any meetings with Tillerson, which is unusual, but Tillerson is head of the State Department and he doesn’t make his people aware of what’s going on? Does the White House not speak to the State Department, or vice versa?

Sure, Tillerson, whose political experience comes from running Exxon Mobil, isn’t much of a player on key foreign policy decisions, even though that’s his job, and he hasn’t been allowed to make his own personnel choices and rarely, if ever, appears in public at any meeting or event with _____.

So, either Tillerson’s State Department is so poorly staffed—he has neither a deputy or a permanent spokesperson—and out of the loop on high-level decision-making that its press secretary wasn’t even informed of a visit by the top diplomat from one of Washington’s most important strategic partners or ...

Foreign governments recognize that the State Department is weakened by a _____ administration choice to head it that they skip the State Department altogether and speak directly to White House aides, like another political neophyte, _____’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

So, again, I wonder, why anyone would have bothered to vote for a man who has no idea what he’s doing, appoints people based on wealth and/or gender, and certainly race, and who never once in his entire seventy years on the planet lifted a finger to help anyone but himself.

This is dysfunction at its core.

And We The People will pay the price until we either demand his impeachment or vote into office those who are willing to do the job for us.

UPDATE: Tillerson just said that he never wanted this job but that his wife told him to take it.

That's why he's Secretary of State ... because his wife told him so. He never wanted it.

Vox