Goodbye, sweet Karen!

Karen Hughes announced yesterday that she was resigning from the Bush Administration again, this time from the post of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. Yes, this was the same Karen Hughes that was hired the first time to help the world see how compassionate George W. Bush’s conservatism truly was. Then, of course, when it was clear that compassionate is the last thing anyone thought of, her job was to spin it. This same woman was then brought back a couple of years later to be one of our top diplomats.

I’ll let that sink in for another second.

Yes, she might be qualified if her job was as diplomat to Appalachia or California, but her main charge was, in fact, to the Muslim World.

I’ll give you one more second.

Yes, Karen Hughes was the disaster we all think she was (and at the time, thought she would be). She was given an impossible task and failed to deliver. No big whoop, right? Right, until you look at what she actually did when she was there. Look at this article by Fred Kaplan at Slate.com and this one by Steve Benen for The Carpetbagger Report. Benen suggests the problem with Ms. Hughes was not who she was or what she was (theoretically) trying to do, but it was what she actually did:

This isn't necessarily about mocking the goals Hughes sought to achieve, but rather the style in which she tried to achieve them. She talked down to her audience, offered the kind of schlock that no one in the Arab world wants, and lectured them about the inadequacies of their culture.

Lo and behold, this didn't improve matters.

Now, if there are any actual diplomats around who could take over as undersecretary of state, that'd be really helpful.

Has it occurred to anyone else that the biggest issue in the Bush administration is not that they are too stupid or optimistic or selfish, but that they actually don’t want to make the world a better place? They actually seem content to destroy the government, destroy international relations, and use half-hearted failures as justifications for their initial desires to destroy others. That and Bush really likes killing people. I think it’s his favorite pastime. Who needs baseball when you have executions to attend and wars to start/maintain perpetually?

But there’s Karen Hughes. Again, putting the compassionate face on the Commander-in-Thief. She’s got that big ol’ bucket of paint, trying to turn his cowboy hat from black to white and nobody’s buying it here—and no one was ever going to buy it there. And what’s worse, perhaps they both new that all along.