{"id":11249,"date":"2007-06-26T11:00:22","date_gmt":"2007-06-26T15:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11249.html"},"modified":"2007-06-26T11:00:22","modified_gmt":"2007-06-26T15:00:22","slug":"a-good-idea-makes-the-rounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-good-idea-makes-the-rounds\/","title":{"rendered":"A good idea makes the rounds"},"content":{"rendered":"

We learned last week that of the 1,000 U.S. employees at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, only 10<\/a> have a working knowledge of Arabic. I suggested<\/a> that perhaps the State Department could address the problem by reaching out to some of the dozens of well-trained Arabic linguists the Pentagon threw out of the military for being gay.<\/p>\n

Apparently, the idea is catching on<\/a>.<\/p>\n

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) urged the State Department Monday to hire homosexual military translators discharged under the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.<\/p>\n

The lawmakers called the policy “absurd and highly biased” and said it “cripples our national security.” <\/p>\n

“We are writing to urge the Department of State to take a specific step — the hiring of our unfairly dismissed, language-qualified soldiers — so our nation might salvage something positive from the lamentable results of this benighted policy,” Lantos and Ackerman wrote in a strongly worded letter to Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lantos and Ackerman also touched on an interesting point I hadn’t seen elsewhere: many of the trained linguists thrown out of the military turn around and work for private contractors who — you guessed it — offer their translation services back to the government at a higher price.
\n
\nIn other words, here’s the series of events:<\/p>\n

* The U.S. government recruits these patriotic gay Americans;<\/p>\n

* the government spends millions training them to speak Arabic;<\/p>\n

* the government then kicks the linguists out of the military;<\/p>\n

* and then those same public officials hire the exact same linguists back at a higher price and with less accountability.<\/p>\n

I desperately want someone — anyone — to explain to me why this is not only a good idea during a time of war, but is also absolutely necessary as an effective government policy, which is the Bush administration line (embraced by every GOP presidential candidate).<\/p>\n

There’s nothing stopping the State Department from hiring these discharged linguists — gay people can’t openly serve in the military, but they can openly serve at State — so maybe the Lantos\/Ackerman letter might help a bit.<\/p>\n

But here’s a thought: if you’re one of the gay linguists who was humiliated and insulted by the Bush administration, how anxious would you be to take a pay cut in order to help these officials out? In effect, how can we expect these men and women to do the administration a favor<\/i> after the way they’ve been treated?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We learned last week that of the 1,000 U.S. employees at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, only 10 have a working knowledge of Arabic. I suggested that perhaps the State Department could address the problem by reaching out to some of the dozens of well-trained Arabic linguists the Pentagon threw out of the military for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}