"Foreign Policy"
"This was a debate over policy. Trump’s critics may not have liked the policy he was pushing. But as former Defense Intelligence Agency official Pat Lang noted on his blog last week, the statute in question applies only to “intelligence activities” but “does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters.”
That’s what this fight is about, said Lang. Speaker after speaker at the hearings asserted that Trump’s views did not comport with official national policy. But the president sets that policy, Lang said, not the diplomats.
“They think they are the people who set national policy and the president is this figurehead who is guided by all these people around him who agree on everything,” he said. “The president doesn’t need to use the State Department at all to conduct foreign policy.”' Paul Mulshine
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Actually, I was too minimal in speaking of "diplomats." Vindman is not a diplomat and there are many other actors in this drama of Borgist angst (foreign policy establishment ) who are not diplomats.
For one thing a large percentage of the Drones at the State Department are civil service employees rather than Foreign Service Officers, and although they do not play well together they agree on the ultimate authority of the Supremacy Clause (non-existent) in the US Constitution that gives the State Department dominion over all the Lord created. A career ambassador's wife once lectured me that the US Army should change the cap badge that officers wear because it looks too much like the Great Seal of the United States which in the State Department can only be displayed by Ambassadors. I told her that she should petition the Secretary of the Army in this matter.
Various departments of government, media, academia, thinktankeries, etc., all have heavy infestations of folks who went to graduate school together in poly sci in all its branches, or who wish to be thought worthy of such attendance. They specialize in group think, conformity, and conformism, even to the solemn dress they affect. The four in hand tie knot is pretty much mandatory for serious consideration for inclusion in the Borg. It indicates a certain preppy insouciance and faux disregard for details of dress.
Trump's casual disregard for all that enrages the Borg who thought they had "won it all" long ago and that they would have a Borgist neocon to deal with in Hillary.
Hell hath no fury like The Borg scorned. pl
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