Mar 25

Mar 25 President Biden: Don't Send Any More Stupid, Unqualified Hacks Overseas By James Bruno

The crush is on by campaign donors and political cronies to land U.S. ambassadorships. It's the quadrennial America's Got Corruption $how.

POLITICO reports:

“Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a Democratic fundraiser who served as ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, said he’s received calls from about a dozen donors in recent weeks trying to determine their next steps.

“When they came to me two years ago, I told them the president is going to send people he knows, likes, trusts and who have been integral in getting him elected,” Beyer said. ‘Now it’s late, way too late. You can’t just write a check.’

Richard Perkins, a donor and former speaker of the Nevada Assembly, told POLITICO that he is lobbying to be the top U.S. diplomat in Canada. In total, about 800 individuals or couples raised at least $100,000 each for Biden’s campaign.

’There are some who do a lot for the campaign and they don’t have a lot of experience in government and you want to take care of them and what the f—- else are you going to do with them?’ said a longtime Democratic donor.”

Before he was ambassador to Switzerland, Don Beyer was a Virginia car dealer.

Sen. Diane Feinstein's moneybags-donor hubby, at 85, for one, is fishing for a European posting (of course!). Mandatory retirement for career diplomats btw is 65. One envisions the two octogenarians tweaking their estate planning between naps as the real diplomatic work is done by embassy staff.

This corrupt selling of ambassadorships makes us a joke before the rest of the world. President Trump, who broke the record, at 44 percent, with the number of amateur-hour cronies he slam-dunked into ambassadorial positions, gave us the likes of Gordon Sondland, a hotelier who, for a $1 million donation to Trump's re-election committee, bought himself the ambassadorship to the European Union. Then he got caught up in Trump's Ukraine corruption resulting in his first impeachment. Sondland's bumbling led to his resignation. A cool million down the drain.

Trump's man in Berlin, Richard Grenell so offended Germans with his abrasive behavior and interference in German internal politics that there was a move in the Bundestag to get him expelled from the country.

Another Trump donor, dermatologist Jeffrey Ross Gunter, decided to fulfill his duties as U.S. ambassador to Iceland from his home in Los Angeles after the Icelanders denied his request to carry a gun and have bodyguards. Iceland's violent crime statistics are on a par with those of Narnia.

And on it goes. George Glass, real estate mogul/QAnon conspiracist envoy to Portugal. Lana Marks, handbag designer/Mar-a-Lago denizen/tax cheat as ambassador to South Africa. One day, somebody's got to write a book about Trump's grand guignol menagerie of misfit ministers.

The thing is, auctioning off U.S. ambassadorships is not one party's prerogative. Typically, presidents sell a third of ambassadorships, concentrated primarily in Europe. The Dems are equally as bad. In fact, some of Barack Obama's clown caravan of envoys rival Trump's in their incompetence and destructiveness. There was Colleen Bell, soap opera unter-producer who landed the ambassadorial job in Hungary for a cool two million bucks. And Cynthia Stroum, Seattle investor who, for a bargain half-a-million, hooked Luxembourg, where she so terrorized her small embassy staff that several curtailed to go serve in Afghanistan and Iraq. The State Department dispatched a shrink to treat the rest of her PTSD-rattled victims.

For laughs and tears, do read my POLITICO piece, Why Does America Send So Many Stupid, Unqualified Hacks Overseas? Also, read how Russian ambassadors, all career diplomats, run circles around our parvenus in another of my POLITICO articles, Russian Diplomats Are Eating America's Lunch.

Presidents used to reward political cronies with military flag officer ranks until Congress outlawed the practice after the Civil War, when the public recoiled at the needless slaughter brought on by incompetent "political generals," men like Daniel Sickles, whose insubordination at Gettysburg caused more than 4,000 Union casualties. Putting dilettantes in charge of diplomacy can lead to devastating consequences as well.

Thus far, Joe Biden has named only one ambassador, career Foreign Service officer Linda Thomas-Greenfield - to the United Nations. As the pressure mounts from donors and politicians to fork over a slew of top diplomatic positions, the least he can do is to keep the giveaways to well under a third - and no soap opera producers or tax cheat handbag designers please.

James Bruno (@JamesLBruno) served as a diplomat with the U.S. State Department for 23 years and is currently a member of the Diplomatic Readiness Reserve. An author and journalist, Bruno has been featured on CNN, NBC’s Today Show, Fox News, Sirius XM Radio, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, and other national and international media.