[lshoultz]

I have developed a real disgust for our Foreign Service...

There has been a great deal in the news lately about Bush being forced to choose between Rumsfeld and Powell. If that is the case, then the career Diplomats at the Department of State will have stabbed another appointee in the back.

Those people are not Americans. They accept assignments in the Foreign Service and some never see America again for decades until they have reached a very senior diplomatic rank. They have the option of taking their promotions in the field and simply move from the embassy in Madrid to the embassy in Lisbon without passing go at the State Department. That process does not breed good American foreign service officers, it breeds citizens of the world who happen to be paid by America. Ergo, their alliegience is to the other diplomats they will see at other postings regardless of which political party is in power here.

Their aloofness and arrogance is one reason that Madeline Albright was such a fit at State. She is a damn poor scholar whose primary fireld of academic inquiry was the relations between the press and the State Department. Look up her bibliography sometime, you'll wonder how she got ANY respect from intellectuals.

Her penchant for five star hotels and restaurants fit nicely with the perks imagined by our pristine Diplomatic Corps as their due because of the crassness of the citizens in America.

If Powell cannot get control of our State Department, we need to cashiere all of the members of the Diplomatic Corps and simply start over. Joe McCarthy was a blight on this land but you know what? He was not completely wrong. If there is an agency of the United States that harbors any old line Communists and a great number of Socialists, it is the State Department. They need to be stationed in America at least every three years for three years so that they do not develop a cotiere of frinds on the payroll of other countries that all conduct their own foreign policy at the afternoon teas regardless of their instruction from the political set and their crass behavior. Let them sweat a little.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Those people are not Americans. They accept assignments in the Foreign Service and some never see America again for decades until they have reached a very senior diplomatic rank. They have the option of taking their promotions in the field and simply move from the embassy in Madrid to the embassy in Lisbon without passing go at the State Department. That process does not breed good American foreign service officers, it breeds citizens of the world who happen to be paid by America. Ergo, their alliegience is to the other diplomats they will see at other postings regardless of which political party is in power here.

That sounds plausible. But what is the Democratic Party's excuse?