Thursday, October 5, 2017

Andrea Mitchell Weirdly Praises Trump Secretary of State as an Unqualified Disaster


Tommy Christopher, ijr.com [Original article contains video.]
Andrea Mitchell 10-4
The Trump Era is a weird era, indeed. Donald Trump's candidacy and presidency have so degraded the expectations journalists have for our government that Trump gets praised for not offending anyone during a scripted condolence statement.
That dynamic appeared to bleed over to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday morning, as Trump's months of humiliating and undermining Tillerson came to a head with a report that Tillerson called Trump a “moron” (or a “f**king moron”) in private.
NBC News's Andrea Mitchell, who has a way with left-handed burns, was trying to compliment Tillerson while lamenting his shabby treatment by Trump, but really kind of destroyed him in the process (emphasis added):
"Rex Tillerson is a man of values. And no one has had a more difficult relationship in the press corps, but you have to respect the fact that this man led a global company. He came to Washington to serve.
And if he didn't get it right because he didn't understand public diplomacy, and the nature of the press corps, and also the need to staff up and get people confirmed, and create a team rather than the small unit he used to fly around the world with doing deals for Exxonmobil, if he didn't get that right, it wasn't for lack of patriotism."
Wait, what? So, Rex Tillerson is a great secretary of state, aside from literally everything that qualifies you to be a secretary of state? And Andrea Mitchell, a veteran journalist, now thinks it's laudable that Tillerson left his giant global company in order to have authority over the global affairs that affect that company to the tune of half a trillion dollars?
I'm not saying Tillerson isn't “patriotic,” whatever the hell that's supposed to mean when our president is neck-deep in a Russian collusion scandal, but there's not much in the way of evidence to claim that as the defining characteristic of his tenure.
I suppose the point is that Tillerson is not as awful as Trump, but as yardsticks go, I wouldn't use it to staff a Sbarro on the New Jersey Turnpike. 

No comments: