Before Miers, Hughes (Palm Beach Post Editorial)

[struggle4progress]

Palm Beach Post Editorial

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Karen Hughes, President Bush's new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, was expecting a different kind of earful. Her recent "listening tour" of Mideast countries attempted to spin past the administration's policies that have harmed America's image in the region. The fact that Ms. Hughes was perplexed by the real concerns she heard shows that the mission required someone qualified to listen.

To win Arab hearts and minds, Mr. Bush sent someone with no diplomatic expertise and no knowledge of the Arab world. Ms. Hughes' qualification consisted of being the president's longtime political adviser, speechwriter and spinmeister. It was not lost on her hosts that there were better candidates if the objective was for more than U.S. political consumption. So from Cairo, Egypt, to Ankara, Turkey, the response was predictable.

There was Ms. Hughes, uninvolved in women's issues in her own country, patronizing women in Saudi Arabia about being prohibited from driving. She heard that U.S. backing for non-democratic regimes was a higher priority. A Kurdish woman lamented that war erases the rights of women, and that "poverty comes after war — and women pay the price." Ms. Hughes responded by defending the Iraqi invasion, only to be told by another woman: "War is not necessary for peace. We can never export democracy and freedom from one country to another." Ms. Hughes crowed that prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, get to worship with their own Qurans, only to be reminded that their incommunicado detention violates international law.

Her appointment underscores that cronyism without qualifications had become a familiar practice for Mr. Bush long before he said his incompetent FEMA director was "doing a heck of a job" and before he nominated his presidential lawyer to the Supreme Court. Before Ms. Hughes got the job of trying to restore U.S. standing came the lame propaganda-film campaign of former ad agency executive Charlotte Beers, and the do-nothing diplomacy of former State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler. <snip>

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2005/10/15/m14a_hughes_edit_1015.html

[opihimoimoi]

1. Karen is one of the latest of Bushies flip flops, he had told us he gonna

"bring back Credibility and Respect to the White House" only to flip flop by bring in cronys and amatuerism instead....

One by one, all his fuck ups has had a collective major impact resulting in declining poll numbers down to embarrassing Levels.

Bushies Mama Crew ain't doing man....he has shown us he is a Mamas boy in a suit.