Yovanovitch's testimony was appalling generally, but for bad taste, it was hard to equal her evocation of the heroism of the Americans left to die in Benghazi.
Powerline sums it up:
And we are Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Patrick Smith, Ty Woods, and Glen Doherty—people rightly called heroes for their ultimate sacrifice to this nation’s foreign policy interests in Libya, eight years ago.
We honor these individuals. They represent each one of you here—and every American. These courageous individuals were attacked because they symbolized America.
As Tonto asked the Lone Ranger when he announced that “We’re surrounded” (by Indians), “What you mean ‘we,’ kemosabe?”
By the same token, I thought, Yovanovitch might have observed:
We are Alger Hiss, who used his State Department post to serve the Soviet Union at great risk to his own career. He had the stubborn courage to lie about it to the end of his life.
We are Julian Wadleigh, Laurence Duggan, and Noel Field, who also spied for the Soviet Union from inside the State Department.
We are former State Department officer Kendall Myers, who continued the tradition in a later generation by giving highly sensitive diplomatic secrets to Cuba.
This functionary, who as even her fluffers admit served at the pleasure of the chief executive, wasn't even fired. She still works for the State Department in a cushy job at Georgetown.
Indeed, if I understood her correctly, she is paid to do nothing official at all. It's a sinecure that allows her to dabble in university work, part time as she apparently prefers.
ReplyDeleteBut she left her bloody fingernails embedded in the front door on her way in. Never underestimate the peril these selfless bureaucrats live in. Just yesterday, she was exposed to the horror of listening to Schiff read aloud to her from mocking tweets published only moments before by President Trump. Why Schiff would read threats aloud to his own witness before she had finished testifying is a difficult question. Wasn't he afraid she'd stop testifying in mid-stream? I don't know how she found the courage to continue.
ReplyDeleteI suppose she can rest assured that her Georgetown sinecure is for life now. Any attempt to pop her off the public teat probably would lead to another impeachment hearing.
Did you actually watch all of her testimony?
ReplyDeleteIt doesn’t seem like you did. She was quite apolitical and answered questions factually. I would recommend that you do so if you haven’t.
I believe it’s all available on CSpan.
-G
Did you actually watch all of her testimony?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I did, in contrast, apparently, to you. Yavonovitch was entirely useless in that all she had were hearsay and hurt feelings, paradoxically yet she was dangerous to the nation.
Why Schiff would read threats aloud to his own witness before she had finished testifying is a difficult question. Wasn't he afraid she'd stop testifying in mid-stream?
He was hoping for that, hoping for her timidity to become so apparent as to clinch the deal for him. Or at least burst into tears as she often seemed on the verge of and as apparently she did in her Star Chamber testimony. As it was, Yavonovitch's openly confessed timidity, to Trump's performance-criticizing tweet and to other examples of criticism of her performance, told governments of our enemies that our own government can easily be pushed around. That emboldens our enemies to act overtly against our interests, even against us. Yovanovitch's overt timidity also tells our friends and allies that we'll fold in a crunch, including theirs.
That's a threat to our national security.
Eric Hines
I don't know whether I'd characterize her as apolitical, but that wasn't really my point. She went out of her way to drape herself in the flag of fallen heroes, which was tone-deaf and deeply offensive. The very idea of whining about how mistreated she feels for losing what she must have thought of as a lifetime appointment-as-of-right, and comparing her loss to the physical danger or death faced by fellow diplomats! She admitted that she deliberately ducked a question about Burisma corruption and the Biden connection when she was confirmed. Politics or no politics, she's a shady jerk. And I'm about fed up with the bruised-flower routine from professional women, too. It's a shame she still draws a federal paycheck.
ReplyDeleteYour perspectives of her time in the hearing seem so out of character to me.
ReplyDeleteShe was asked to come and answer questions and she did. Whether it was hearsay or not is it something she has control of. And much of it wasn’t hearsay. She was asked what she experienced, the order in which things happened, who did or said what.
There were many times in which she could have expressed outrage or anger or speculated about Trump’s motives, but she didn’t. She would simply say “I don’t know.”
She was asked how things affected her family, a point at which she could have elaborated and used to create sympathy and yet she said she would rather not go into it.
Shady jerk? Bruised flower?
Even the Republicans on the committee had nothing bad to say about her.
It is a strange rabbit hole that your interpretations emerge from.
I have a hard time understanding the venom.
Also, calling her timid and acting as if she shouldn’t actually be worried about things when she is working in a region where people are actually killed or attacked with acid, or Russians feel no compunction about poisoning people they don’t like, seems to be wrong.
G
Her testimony about things she said she heard was, however accurately related, the definition of hearsay. She heard people say things. When asked about actual actions she saw--relevant to an impeachment--she testified she saw nothing.
ReplyDeleteAll the questions about impacts on her personally and on her family from all the mean things said about and to her were just questions designed to jerk tears and wholly irrelevant to any impeachment proceeding.
calling her timid and acting as if she shouldn’t actually be worried about things when she is working
That's a cynically offered false dichotomy. She was intimidated, she testified, by a mean tweet and by a Zelenskiy-Trump exchange wherein they said mean things about her. She never indicated timidity in dealing with the threatening environment in which she worked--she just draped the blood of fallen diplomats, diplomats who served in actual, continuously dangerous environments, about her shoulders.
Eric Hines
I suppose I'm still angry about an administration who left its ambassador to die, and his fellow diplomats who didn't resign in protest, and the State Dept. flacks, Clinton chief among them, who lied their heads off rather than face the shame of what they had done. To this day they've never admitted their culpability. So to have a diplomat from that same corps compare her situation--terminated as a diplomat for refusing to fall in line with her boss's priorities, only to come home to a cushy sinecure--to compare that plight specifically to the plight of the ambassador killed in Benghazi . . . it's beyond even my considerable capacity for contempt.
ReplyDeleteThere were many truthful ways she could have answered while preserving some dignity. She could have repeatedly insisted that she served at the pleasure of the chief executive, and that she declined to focus on her own psychodrama. She started with an impassioned exposition of "our policy," as if it were something she's entitled to pursue independently from the policy set forth by the chief executive. She actually complained that she has to meet with people who question whether she really speaks for the President--something she made it fairly clear she does not. She instead made it clear she knows better than he does what our foreign policy must be. If she was at the hearing only because she was asked to appear, she certainly took advantage of her appearance to mount a soap-box and complain about her career.
It was hours and hours of testimony, most of which consisted of her complaining that she had a good handle on the right policy, but other people lied about her, so she was unfairly fired. Frankly, I don't care, and certainly not in an impeachment hearing. To the extent she had anything useful to offer on the central question of who was genuinely trying to look into corruption involving the U.S. (the Biden family) and Ukraine, this is the nub of her testimony: She claimed under oath both that she had and had not consulted with the Obama administration about concerns over the Biden/Burisma corruption. Beyond that, as Powerline summarized for us: "(1) Ukraine didn’t agree to investigate the Bidens, (2) Ukraine got military aid anyway, (3) Burisma, the company that paid Hunter Biden to sit on its board, is highly corrupt, and (4) the [Obama] State Department viewed Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma as problematic."
The pose Tex opened with reminds me of the time I went to the State Department after having been in Iraq. Now we'd had embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams (ePRTs) with us in Iraq, and they were State-led. But the only State Department employees I met were the two actual ePRT team leaders, one FS-01 and one SES guy. Aside from those two, 100% of the ePRTs were contractors they'd hired, because they couldn't get any State Department personnel to volunteer for Iraq, especially not in the field where it was dangerous. Aside from a handful of brave guys like those two, the few State Department employees in Iraq lived in the fortress-like embassy in the Green Zone. There they did things like hold Iraq's first Gay Pride event (while the deployed soldiers and Marines couldn't even have sports magazines for fear the scantily-clad pictures would offend our Muslim hosts) at their embassy pub (while the soldiers and Marines couldn't have a beer because of General Order #1).
ReplyDeleteSo anyway, after seeing all this during my time in Iraq, I came home and we went to the State Department to hear some top people talk about their great work. And this guy, he was one of Clinton's top guys when she was SOS, he preached all about how brave the diplomatic corps was, and how they were bringing up a new kind of Foreign Service Officer who would boldly go and wear muddy boots in the field.
It was almost all bull, but not quite completely all. There were a small number of guys like that FS-01 and that SES guy. They were brave guys, they were doing the stuff. There were some diplomatic security personnel who went outside the wire to check the Army's work in setting up security for election sites. Those guys deserved honor. But this dude in the blue shirt was trying to steal the honor they were due and spread it around all the pencil-pushers who wouldn't have gone to Iraq on a bet.
She sounds like that to me, invoking Ambassador Stevens -- a brave guy, whatever one thinks of the wisdom of running guns out of Benghazi, or starting a war in Libya at all for that matter. Definitely the Benghazi crew is due some honor. It's shameful, though, for someone like herself to try to wrap her in the honor that is due to other, better people.
And I still don't understand why we're paying her now that she's not actually working for us anymore. I guess it comes from being a member of the right class. No one would think of not paying her, just because she no longer performs an actual job. Only little people stop being paid when they're fired. People like her, they just get transferred to a nice sinecure where they continue to draw pay like nothing changed.
I figured out pretty early on, about 2006, that the State Department was sabotaging the Iraq war, against US interests.
ReplyDeleteI remember at the time that I got a significant amount of push back on that front.
I guess it comes from being a member of the right class.
It comes from not having enough killers. Satan only kills people that would expose the Left hand negative path of service to self at the expense of others, or those who polarize too much to the Right hand path of service to others (harmony). That's because the right hand path grossly outnumbers the Left hand path, it alwys has, but because evil has the power to convert good/neutral to evil, they can do a lot more than is apparent.
This War has been ongoing for longer than America or humanity has been around. There is literally nothing, ignorant, lost, forgotten, mortals can do about it to stop it at this stage. Other than win or lose it. It's not about American civil wars or the Deep State. It's about the Divine Plan for humanity. That's a little bit above your pay grade, Mr President and American patriots.
I'm really having a harder and harder time seeing her as either apolitical or personally appealing. https://spectator.org/did-you-know-this-about-marie-yovanovitch/
ReplyDelete