America’s top diplomat tries out a new form of diplomacy.
This reminds me of when the polite, predictable mainstream comedy of the 50s and early 60s first acquired an edge, then gradually morphed into insult comedy. Now it’s time for polite, predictable mainstream diplomacy to follow that path to insult diplomacy.
Actually, Pompeo seems to be floating a novel new defense of Trump: nobody cares if he fucks Ukraine over, which is basically accurate within Trump’s low-info base.
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Unlike many of Trump’s lickspittles, Mike Pompeo has legitimate academic credentials. He graduated first in his class at West Point and got a law degree from Harvard. He is also the Secretary of State, so you’d think, given the combination of his education and his job, that he would have some idea where the major countries lie on the globe. But he apparently does not know Bangladesh from Ukraine.
We know this because he asked an NPR reporter to find Ukraine on the map, and we know that she must have pointed to the right country, given that she has a degree in European Studies from Cambridge. It might be possible even for a scholar to mess up on an obscure country in Central Europe or the Balkans. I’m not sure I’d point to the right one for Moldova, for example. But nobody with a decent education could miss Ukraine, because (1) it is the largest country entirely in Europe, (2) it distinctively has Crimea hanging into the Black Sea beneath it. I’ll bet just about every reader of this blog could get it right because … well, because you can and do read things. Given that regular schmucks like us would get it right, Ukraine certainly would not be missed by somebody with a graduate degree in European Studies from one of the world’s leading universities. So we know she got it right.
But ol’ Pompom subsequently tweeted “Bangladesh is not Ukraine.” Therefore, the only possible conclusion we can draw is that ol’ Pompano himself actually thought she was pointing to Bangladesh, when we know she must have been pointing to Ukraine. That’s pretty crazy. It means ol’ Pomposity doesn’t know one of those from another!
Now ol’ Pompadour is probably right that the average American could not find Ukraine on a map. Hell, the average American probably can’t find Colorado on a map. But ol’ Pamplemousse, who must be a bright man, is so clueless that he thinks a serious European studies scholar would not be able to find Ukraine on a map. How could he be that ignorant, given the native intelligence necessary to gain his academic credentials? I can’t explain it. That belief is deluded enough in itself, but what’s laughably stupid is that he thinks it is remotely possible for that scholar to think Ukraine is east of India!
That’s just how out of touch ol’ Pomposity is.
And he is America’s Secretary of State.
Good luck, world.
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Pompeo also claims that his comment, “Do you think Americans care about fucking Ukraine?” was off the record. That’s the tactic of a typical guilty party with no defense. “Don’t blame me for saying it. Blame her for quoting me.” This is the non-judicial equivalent of, “Ignore those four tons of cocaine they found in my house, and those e-mails explaining how I buy and sell the cocaine. I’m innocent because they made a mistake when filling out the search warrant.”