Go, Rex, Go!
Scuttlebutt is circulating inside the State Department that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson may announce his resignation at a senior staff meeting tomorrow, Tuseday, December 11. As is the case in any failing organization with a detached leadership contemptuous of its underlings, this likely is just more crazy wishful thinking making the rounds of idled employees with too much time on their hands (not through any fault of their own).
But one can hope.
In my article in Washington Monthly last week, What Happens to National Security After Gutting the State Department, I noted,
Since he came into the job ten months ago, the former ExxonMobil CEO has presided over the depletion of State’s senior ranks as he obsesses over spreadsheets at the expense of diplomacy.
Three-quarters of the State Department’s four dozen top political positions lie vacant. Decision making, such as it is, has resided in the hands of a tiny coterie of Tillerson acolytes in the policy planning office—traditionally the department’s in-house think tank—now an opaque star chamber cut off from the rest of the bureaucracy.
As tensions spike over North Korean nuclear testing, there is no assistant secretary for East Asia to manage policy, nor is there an ambassador in Seoul. As civil war rages in Syria, Saudi politics enters turbulence, and Iran sends warships to the Gulf of Mexico, there is no assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs nor ambassadors to key countries in the region. Zimbabweans just tossed Robert Mugabe out of power, yet the key position of assistant secretary for African affairs remains inexplicably vacant.
Is this any way to run a railroad? Not unless you're out to derail your own train - which many folks believe is the intention of this anti-"globalist," anti-intellectual, quasi-anarchistic administration enraptured by the way of the warrior, steeped in a medieval mentality rooted in race-based blood and soil tribal politics. You see, such people - let's call them the "Bannon Luddites" - are of the conviction that our nation's foreign ministry gets in the way of Making America Great Again.
Add to Mr. Tillerson's utterly feckless management of the State Department his boss's obscene delight in tormenting his cabinet officials. Just as Tillerson was making a rare stab at conducting diplomacy to defuse the North Korea situation, Trump tweets, “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man. Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!” He had previously challenged his Secretary of State to an IQ test after it was reported Tillerson allegedly had referred to his president as a "moron."
Finally, there was the clearly Trump-contrived rumor circulating over the past couple of weeks that Rex was soon to be canned and replaced by CIA director Mike Pompeo. Did the president do this to put him on notice that he had better toe the line? Or, was it just another sadistic torment on the part of an unhinged commander in chief with serious personality disorder?
With work relations like these, why hang around, Rex? You're clearly operating way past your Peter Principle threshold. You have no clue how to do your job. Your organization hemorrhages its best and brightest as morale sinks to depths where even transparent invertebrates cannot survive. Your employees detest you. Congress has no respect for you. America's standing in the world plummets daily as our Mad Hatter president prances about the stage gleefully destroying the apparatus of government, not to mention sound policy. World leaders may be polite to you, but do not view you as the go-to guy on U.S. decision making. Historians have already placed you, hands down, as absolutely the worst Secretary of State in the 241-year history of the United States. And finally, the constant demeaning treatment you receive from this White House has to be a blow to a proud Texan's ego.
Salvage what remains of your self-respect and respect from others.
Go, Rex, Go!