Karen Hughes exits stage right

October 31, 2007

I’ve never been entirely clear on why Karen Hughes was tapped to be the Bush administration’s undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Granted, Hughes is not without talents — she was a capable local journalist, she’s not a bad writer, and she manages to connect unrelated events to 9/11 quite well — but there’s literally nothing in her background regarding diplomacy or international affairs.

After a couple of years on the job, and no successes to speak of, Hughes announced her resignation this morning.

Karen Hughes, who led efforts to improve the U.S. image abroad and was one of President Bush’s last remaining advisers from the close circle of Texas aides, will leave the government at the end of the year. […]

Announcing Hughes’ decision to leave the department in mid-December, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she had accepted the resignation “with a great deal of sadness but also a great deal of happiness for what she has achieved” and with the understanding that she would continue to work on several projects. […]

“I knew that she would bring a great dedication and great commitment to all that we’re trying to do,” Rice said. “She has done just a remarkable job.”

Really? Because I’ve been looking for any kind of achievements from Hughes’ efforts, and I can’t seem to find one.

Indeed, the AP notes, rather matter-of-factly, “Polls show no improvement in the world’s view of the U.S. since Hughes took over. A Pew Research Center survey earlier said the unpopular Iraq war is a persistent drag on the U.S. image and has helped push favorable opinion of the United States in Muslim Indonesia, for instance, from 75 percent in 2000 to 30 percent last year.”

Any suggestion that Hughes is responsible for declining U.S. popularity would be wildly unfair. That said, it’s not unreasonable to consider Hughes’ on-the-job performance. (I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t very good.)

I’m reminded, for example, of this Fred Kaplan piece, noting one of Hughes’ trips to the Middle East.

Could someone please explain to me what Karen Hughes is doing. Her maiden voyage to the Middle East has turned into a fiasco. She assures a room of Saudi women that they, too, will someday drive cars; they tell her they’re actually happy right now, thank you. She meets with a group of Turkish women — hand-picked by an outfit that supports women running for political office — who brusquely tell her she has no credibility as long as U.S. troops occupy Iraq.

In a sense, this is par for the course when American officials meet with unofficial audiences abroad. But here’s the puzzler: Why is it Karen Hughes who’s taking these meetings? It was strange enough when her longtime friend President George W. Bush named her as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. It’s absolutely mind-numbing to discover that she considers it one of her mandates to be the public diplomat. […]

Put the shoe on the other foot. Let’s say some Muslim leader wanted to improve Americans’ image of Islam. It’s doubtful that he would send as his emissary a woman in a black chador who had spent no time in the United States, possessed no knowledge of our history or movies or pop music, and spoke no English beyond a heavily accented “Good morning.” Yet this would be the clueless counterpart to Karen Hughes, with her lame attempts at bonding (“I’m a working mom”) and her tin-eared assurances that President Bush is a man of God (you can almost hear the Muslim women thinking, “Yes, we know, that’s why he’s relaunched the Crusades”).

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.

Be prepared for the Presidential Medal of OK-ness or something to grace her wall as they usher into the private sector.

  • This serves to illustrate that the hicks who dominate the White House really believe their own balderdash, or at least expect the world to be as stupid and clueless as the members of their own base.

    The unmitigated buffoonery of this woman and her “mission” defies all attempts at rational explanation. Thank God she’s finally seen the light and is getting out before she gets sucked into the bottomless swamp of the Bush administration’s last futile moments.

  • Hughes’ appointment was reflective of one of the key problems in the Bush administration: they seem to be unable to conceive that people in other countries aren’t really just like us underneath. The idea that someone might hold fundamentally different beliefs than we do or that they might value some things far more and others far less than we do is has always been beyond the imagination of Bush and most of his appointees.

    Thus, the delusional expectations for the war in Iraq, the appointments of Condi Rice, Karen Hughes, John Bolton and so many others. Thus the ham-handed, tone-deaf foreign policy.

  • I like to think of her as Karen Useless, because that’s what she is.

    I’m sure there will be a Medal of Freedom for her sometime before the end of Bush’s term.

    Personally, I think that on Inauguration Day, 2009, the new Democratic president should offer Medals of Freedom to every American for making it to the day when we are all finally free of Bush and Cheney.

  • Bush’s chums from Texas all share three traits with him:

    Ignorance.

    Incompetence.

    Arrogance.

  • Karen Hughes is just another Bush fawner, and those are the only kind of people he EVER brings into the government, since people with ability would challenge his dominance. Look at Condaleeza Rice. Absence of ability flows from the top, and all that’s left is “bring your friends in” to be “part of this great administration”.

  • When an Egyptian opposition leader inquired why President Bush mentions God in his speeches, she asked him “whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our Constitution cites ‘one nation under God.’ He said, ‘Well, never mind.'”

    The word ‘God’ appears nowhere in the US Constitution.

  • Any suggestion that Hughes is responsible for declining U.S. popularity would be wildly unfair…

    OK, call me wildly unfair. She helped get Bush elected. Bush has single-handedly been responsible for declining U.S. popularity. So she bears some responsibility.

    The thing about her I always remember is how she could lie to people straight faced, knowing that they knew she was lying.

    From the mouth of the Dirtiest of F***ing Hippies, Tucker Carlson:

    I heard that Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she’d heard — that I watched her hear — she in fact had never heard, and she’d never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane.

    I’ve obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness.

    http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2003/09/13/carlson/index.html

    Almost my ass, Tucker. She was pretty much a female version of George W Bush. And Tucker the Moron might not know the word, but “sociopath” fits pretty much to a T.

  • Anne @#4: I love that idea! If the new president gave all of us a Medal of Freedom, it would be not only fitting, but also totally diminish the ones Bush has so smugly given.

  • Hughes’ appointment was reflective of one of the key problems in the Bush administration: they seem to be unable to conceive that people in other countries aren’t really just like us underneath

    I actually think you’ve got this backwards (though I agree with the other stuff you said). Just take Kaplan’s example of Hughes’ Muslim equivalent. Would any Bushie respond well to that? Of course not. Conservatives are offended at people who can’t speak English and who don’t respect their culture or beliefs. They also believe that Muslims and the rest of the world will bow to our will if we bully them enough; as only conservatives are apparently smart enough to realize that you should fight back against bullies or avenge the death of your loved ones. But they imagine that everyone else is completely different and will surrender the first time they’re bombed.

    The truth is that conservatives imagine that everyone who isn’t in their group is completely different from them and therefore inferior. It would be a dream if these people treated others the way they expect to be treated, but they won’t. There are two standards for these people: How they deserve to be treated, and how everyone else should be treated; and never the twain shall meet. Sure, they know that other people have different beliefs. They just think those beliefs are wrong and that it is wrong to pay any respect to those beliefs.

    One of the funnier examples is the Karen Hughes example from above. Many conservatives are adament that woman don’t belong in the workplace, and many more insist that some women prefer not to live the “feminist” lifestyle. And I’m sure Hughes is perfectly aware of that…when she’s in our country. It’s inconceivable that Hughes would have toured the Deep South telling women that they should all have jobs and shouldn’t be oppressed by their husbands. It’s only when she leaves the country that she’d attempt to convince women that their lifestyles are inherently wrong. And it’s because she imagines that they’re just not like us.

  • Dr. B., you have the right of it. There is a failure of imagination in the conservatives and it is as you described it.

    On another note; as a Boomer, I grew up in the halcyon days when it wasn’t economically necessary for wives to work. It’s interesting that the economic deck has been stacked so that it’s necessary for most wives to work yet many Republicans insist that they are merely greedy and also inferior parents for doing so.

  • Our public image in the world is pure propaganda that can’t be backed up by Bush cronies because it only adds to our hypocrisy.
    Notice how all our federal agencies are headed by people who are trying to prove they are unnecessary and unneeded. The corporations will take care of consumer protection issues., DoJ can only approve Bush policies, State dept can only issue condolences for their mistakes and continue the corporate agenda advanced by Bush/Cheney. Every dept. has either been politicized, or headed up by Bush cronies as rewards for carrying out the Bush agenda. It is the systematic destruction of our way of life, our system of checks and balances, and our social protections to make way for corporate rule. These are the steps to fascism and they are already in place. Only impeachment will stop it and so it will not be stopped and it’s a shame that all we can do is stand against the wall and watch.

  • The thing that surprised me about this announcement was that she was still on the payroll. Somehow, I thought that after her first spectacular flops like the one Kaplan described she’d waited a while and then just ‘gone home to her family.’

    Considering her remarkable ‘talents’, it is surprising that she’s still been doing her thing for all this time and not created more colossal, news-worthy fiascos. She’s gone for what, over a year?, without creating an enormous international incident? Amazing, for someone so close to Bush.

  • I take back my statement that Karen Hughes “defies all attempts at rational explanation.” Dennis nailed it @ #3. Nice one, bro. 🙂

  • I surely will not miss her since I thought she was gone already. What a disaster for our public image she and Condi and the rest of the Bush Minions have been.

  • Not to get too deeply into all this feminist stuff, but…I think Hughes’ emphasis has not been that Middle Eastern women should work, but that they should have the choice and the opportunity – just as women in this country do. The problem is that what she touts overseas and what she is the shining example of for Middle Easten women, is not viewed with as much admiration and adulation by her fellow conservatives in this country. And while Hughes is happy to benefit from the hard work of women who struggled so that she could have this vast array of choices, she and others of her political philosophy have done little to advance or support the legion of working women in this country – many of whom are single parents working out of necessity, not choice.

    In other words, just another Bush Hypocrite, who wants the good life for herself and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about those who don’t have it as good.

  • It’s interesting that the economic deck has been stacked so that it’s necessary for most wives to work yet many Republicans insist that they are merely greedy and also inferior parents for doing so.

    It could be argued that the reason why men make so much less is because women flooded the workplace, thus having more workers fighting for the same jobs and therefore depressing the wage rates; particularly as women make less money, thus depressing wage rates even more. And so the feminist dream of having more women in the workplace was a self-fulfilling prophesy which doomed women to work who didn’t want to. But you didn’t hear that from me.

    Of course, it could also be argued that the Baby Boom flooded the market with too many people fighting for the same jobs, and that once they’re gone, us youngsters will be living high on the hog. And with you guys sucking up Social Security and Medicare, we’re going to need it. I’m also hoping that you guys solve all the problems with old age, so that by the time my generation is in charge, we’re going to live forever; and at the top of the heap, no less. I’m in my mid thirties right now, so I’ll give you twenty more years to cure everything. But I guess that doesn’t really have much to do with Karen Hughes or anything.

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