Mike Pompeo State Department dinners a scandal? Right, and Democrats are pure as snow
Allegations against Mike Pompeo, including that he staged large, “lavish” and purportedly self-serving State Department dinners with no obvious diplomatic design, don’t need defending here, only by the secretary of state.
What the accusations do cry out for is a little perspective.
While the dinners sound indefensible — although they featured business leaders with keen interest in international relations — are they somehow politically disqualifying? Should Pompeo be made to stitch the scarlet letter “S” on a scandalized lapel? Should conservatives and Kansans sweep the vast shards of his political future into the dustbin of ignominy?
If so, what other Washington politicians should be so dealt with for — gasp! — the offense of self-promotion, which, as you well know, is as rare in Washington as Bigfoot riding bareback over The Mall on a unicorn, and has now apparently been made illegal.
Further, a lot of us in the center and on the right of American politics might be more impressed with such allegations if the scrutiny were evenhanded. Which it is not. Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, said this week on MSNBC, with what had to be manufactured conviction, that there was “not a hint of corruption during eight years of Barack Obama.”
Isn’t it just a serendipitous freak of nature how pure as the driven snow Democrats are? How else could someone such as Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez — you can find him under “Mr. Ethical” on Google — deign to weigh in on Pompeo from the top floor of a finely appointed glass house?
Or maybe there’s something else at play here other than the party’s good fortune or good breeding. Maybe, just maybe, it comes down to scrutiny and focus and bias. Maybe McCaskill and many national political reporters have blinders on. Did they miss Obama’s Fast and Furious scandal? His spying on the Associated Press and Fox News? Having the IRS sit its considerable self on top of conservative nonprofits? Benghazi and the bald-faced lies that followed? The Hillary Clinton shadow server, which was cleaned of possible evidence, “What? Like with a cloth or something”? The Obama CIA’s alleged spying on a Senate committee and FBI targeting the Trump campaign? Let’s just hope no one goes back and finds out that Bo the dog was walked by Obama staffers. That would be the first blot on his chaste presidency.
If conservatives and Kansans don’t shatter social distancing rules in their rush to buy tar and feather every time a Republican of note is accused of something — which is apparently a key plank in the Democratic Party platform — then maybe the boy has been crying wolf much too often (see: collusion, Russia).
And maybe the wolf-crying is a tad one-sided. Only a Republican could be scarred with the knife’s edge of scandal for having someone walk his dog.
Of course, this blatant, grating double-standard means Republicans have to be doubly as scrupulous as Democrats. It’s just the way it is, for reasons nobody can seem to articulate.
But still. The national media carry on about Pompeo, as they have with Trump, as if being on the imperious side, and maybe even unlikable for some, were politically disqualifying characteristics. In Washington, if you can believe that. Well, for many, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi co-authored the book on imperious and unlikable. “Scandalous” behavior by a secretary of state? Mrs. Clinton owns the copyright on that outright. Wining and dining the rich and famous? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama trademarks.
If only Pompeo were a Democrat and had invited movie moguls rather than industry mavens. Dinner with Richard Gere would have been glitzy rather than ghastly, and no doubt essential to world order.
Kansas Republicans I’ve spoken with are wholly unimpressed by the opening scenes of this familiar, formulaic flick.
“I just don’t see the big deal,” says Alan Cobb, a Pompeo friend and political observer. “I mean, he is the face of the United States for a lot of countries. I don’t see anything inappropriate.”
Even a potential political rival, were Pompeo to seek the state’s U.S. Senate seat, isn’t ready to pounce on the secretary of state.
“There have been a lot of allegations about the Trump presidency and those serving him in the last three years,” Dave Lindstrom, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, said in a statement. “It is now coming to light that those allegations are untrue and unfounded. Guilty until proven innocent is not the American way.”
Chris Steineger, a former state senator from Kansas City who’s been both a Democrat and now a Republican — and who has experience in State Department operations — sees little more than party politics and an attempt to make hay where there is none.
Unless there’s a whole lot more to this story, Kansans have seen this movie before, and it still bombs.
