On the whole, I think that the President of the United States should be able to choose the Cabinet he wants to govern with. Yes, the Senate should advise before it consents, but for me the bar for turfing a cabinet member has to be actual incompetence. Certainly, a nominee should not be dismissed for sharing policy views with her President.\n
Therefore, I’m pretty happy with the news that the Senate confirmed Secretary Rice, 85-13<\/a>. In other words, the President gets the Secretary of State to which he is entitled, while it is made clear this is the worst choice in recent history. Not to say an argument couldn’t be formulated for her actual incompetence—has she ever got anything right? I mean, she made her foreign policy name saying we shouldn’t touch M. Gorbachev with a ten-foot pole, and that the Communists were still strong and stable. She has a longish and prominent academic career of making predictions about public policy, so it should be pretty easy to check if any of them were right.\n Still, clearly analysis is one thing and diplomacy is another. The most important job of the Secretary of State is, um, what was it again? What is it that she’s qualified to do? I mean, I don’t mean to play dumb, but I understood what Madeleine Albright was hired for, more or less to do the job she had been doing at the UN, but at a higher level. Before then, Warren Christopher’s qualifications involved negotiating with China and Panama and so on. Lawrence Eagleburger was also an old State hand by the time he was nominated. Of course George Shultz was an economist, and James Baker was, um, a Cabinet Member. Colin Powell, like Al Haig, came out of the military, although Al Haig as our NATO guy had more diplomatic cred then Mr. Powell. Still, I suppose Mr. Powell’s role in the Kuwait affair involved some diplomatic skills, although of course I have no idea what they would be.\n But what, again, are Ms. Rice’s qualifications for the job of America’s top diplomat? I mean, she was qualified to be National Security Advisor, whether you think she did a good job of it or if you perceive the actual universe, but surely in the American system<\/a>, there’s an expectation that the Secretary of a Department should have some expertise in that field? Ah, well. I suppose looking at that, the most qualified person that there was any chance of being put forward to the Senate was John Negroponte.\n Thank you, On the whole, I think that the President of the United States should be able to choose the Cabinet he wants to govern with. Yes, the Senate should advise before it consents, but for me the bar for turfing a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17282,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2597\/revisions\/17282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"