“Negotiating the Whirlwind” (New Yorker, December 21&28, 2015) celebrates John Kerry, but it is interesting even for folks who are not John Kerry fans due to the examples of what goes on within the State Department.
What kind of achievements can be specifically celebrated?
With the King gone, the Saudi advisers, despite their ritual expressions of distaste for Iran, agreed to be in the same room with Zarif at future meetings in Vienna. This would not be first-level news around the world, necessarily, and the war went on, and the waves of refugees kept arriving in Jordan and Turkey and on the shores of Lesvos. But, for Kerry, these were the kinds of moves—a pawn seizing a center square—that just might lead to an endgame.
(Note that Saudi Arabia and Iran severed diplomatic relations a few weeks after this magazine was printed.)
What are the results when the government spends 8X as much operating an airliner than do the airlines? (See TIME article from 2013 on the $43,000/hour operating cost to the taxpayers for a 757)
As Secretary of State, however, Kerry spends much of his life onboard a worse-for-wear government jet, a Boeing 757. Both Kerry and Clinton have often had the humbling experience of the plane breaking down: a blown tire, a leak in an auxiliary fuel tank, “electronic problems.”
The article contains some bonus material. Are you unsure how to think about the reign of King Bush II? About the achievements of Hillary Clinton? The New Yorker will tell you what to think:
In 2004, when Kerry lost the Presidential race to George W. Bush, who is widely considered the worst President of the modern era, he refused to challenge the results, despite his suspicion that in certain states, particularly Ohio, where the Electoral College count hinged, proxies for Bush had rigged many voting machines. But he could not suffer the defeat in complete silence. He was outraged that Bush, who had won a stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, used campaign surrogates, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to slime his military record. [2nd paragraph, emphasis added]
As a diplomat, Hillary Clinton wins credit inside the Administration for visiting a hundred and twelve countries and helping to transform America’s image in the world after the catastrophic Bush years. She led efforts to open relations with Burma, brokered a 2012 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and drafted economic sanctions on Iran.
The article agrees with one of the attorneys we interviewed for Real World Divorce, that “there are easier and quicker ways for an American to make money than by working”:
[Kerry] married twice into substantial fortunes.
Philip, aren’t you a bit hard on the old John Kerry? Is it his fault that in his social circles there probably aren’t any suitably intellectual, attractive welfare takers, but mainly posh totty, various heiresses, well-to-do widows and still-fetching multiple divorcées?
Or was he expected to advertise for some “university of life graduate” mate in m4w columns of craigslist.org? It goes without saying that he’d then have to employ a HR service bureau just to weed out unsuitable “getting pregnant by Kerry should be worth that of 2 dentists'” schemers first.
Besides, don’t you see that, whatever his motives, the end result evens out the obvious male-female gold-digging inequality in America.
CALTECH/MIT VOTING TECHNOLOGY PROJECT:
“We conclude that there is no evidence, based on exit polls, that electronic voting
machines were used to steal the 2004 election for President Bush. ”
http://web.archive.org/web/20071201113859/http://www.vote.caltech.edu/media/documents/VotingMachines3.pdf
If there had been rigging then there would be detectable differences between precincts where there was (rigged) machine counting and precincts where unriggable paper ballots were used, but there were none.
Bush using surrogates to slime Kerry was dirty pool but Kerry using Dan Rather and Mary Mapes to slime Bush’s military record was merely exposing the truth.