ON NYT: STATE DEPARTMENT DISSENTERS REVOLT

Again I read the  NY Times with sadness.  The “old gray lady” once had a reputation as the the newspaper of record.  “All the news that’s fit to print” as a proud headliner,  Now it prints scurrilous unverified allegations and rumors as “news”.  It’s readership once could be sure its stories were vetted and verified.  Now one approached it like they do the sensational rags you pick up at the supermarket check out counter.  What a comedown.

But back to today’s Times’ story.  “How the State department’s Dissenters Incited a Revolt then a Rallying Cry”.  Novermeber 10, 2019. 

STATE CAREERISTS IGNORE THE FACT THAT THEY DO NO SET POLICY

THE ELECTED PRESIDENT AND HIS APPOINTEES SET POLICY

NEW PRESIDENT —NEW POLICY  

The lead line is “Shock anger and sadness are giving way to pride among career diplomats that they are defending American ideas and holding the Trump Administration accountable.  The piece continues to praise these career diplomats in their “revolt’ against “the president and his top appointees” ...they complain about “policy being hijacked by partisan politics”.  

The Times’ authors go on to gleefully laud the “resisters” and those leading the “revolt” against the administration  who they report will go on to testify against the president in the public impeachment hearings next week. 

The thing that these young authors seem to have never learned in Gov 101 was that the State Department and its careerist employees DO NOT MAKE POLICY.   The 

State Department is an arm of the executive branch.  They are there to IMPLEMENT THE POLICY OF THE PRESIDENT.  

Elections have consequences.  The President has the imprimatur of the electorate.  He sets foreign policy goals and policies State Department officials may not like the policy changes but that is what elections are for.  We are a nation governed by the will of the people—not the State Department careerists who would like to keep doing what they were doing.  

The Times should have explained that to these whippersnapper, uniformed individuals who have ignored the basic principles of our representative democracy.