Texas T for the Tillerson

By Henry Cabot Lodge
Diplomatic Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The common clay of Ambridge, PA and all the other old mill towns that voted for the Tangerine-Faced Grifter must be on Cloud Nine after seeing whom he has chosen for  his  “populist” Administration.  Let's see, he's got a former senior finagler from Goldman Sachs, an avowed enemy of public housing at HHS, a billionairess who's vowed to destroy public schools at Education, General Jack D. Ripper as National Security Adviser, and the latest gift to America's depressed and not at all racist working class: the plutocratic CEO of the world's largest and most rapacious oil company, who has spent his career devoting himself to drowning the East Coast of the United States when not poisoning the air, the water, and the wildlife of Alaska.

The nominee for Secretary of State is a well-known oil magnate

Of course, the angry white men and women of Ambridge might not put down their crack pipe long enough to register a protest, since it's only Secretary of State and their Facebook feeds aren't crammed with photos of gorillas bearing Rex Tillerson's name.  The sentient among us are supposed to buy Assistant Principal Mike Pence's line that he's qualified to serve as Secretary of State for the Trans-Atlantic Oblast of the Russian Federation, nominally known as the United States, because he ran a big oil company that did a lot of deals abroad, like with his BFF Vladimir Putin.

Now we've known a few CEO's in our day.  They shared a number of qualities:

1. An insane oversupply of unearned self-regard
2. A laser-like focus on next year's bonus
3. A proven record of relentless kissing up that brought them to their current pinnacle of success
4. A childlike love of barking orders and insults to subordinates
5. A paranoid belief that everyone is out to get them

Of those qualities, the only one that might be helpful to a Secretary of State is the last: a Secretary of State, especially in an Administration as dysfunctional and directionless as that presided over by the Grifter-Elect, needs to keep in mind what his enemies are doing to f**k him and how he can f**k them first.  And not just enemies: it's good practice for dealing with foreign states, whether they are our allies, like Russia, or our enemies, like France.

The other attributes, not so much.  Tillerson will trouser $200 million even if he sits on the Seventh Floor and plays pinochle.  The kissing ass will of course be required, but he'll have to take a ticket just to get anywhere near that sagging bronze butt. Of course, Tillerson will shit all over anyone and everyone in his Department, but that will only ensure that he is not informed about things he'd be better off knowing, like who else in the U.S. Government is trying to do him dirty.

The bigger problem is that the skill set so helpful to climbing the oily pole doesn't do you much good in Foggy Bottom.  You can throw your briefing book at foreign service officers or even foreign ambassadors, but that won't help you decipher the ever-more ominous pronouncements from China before the guns go off across the Straits of Taiwan, much less the Delphic emanations from the Pentagon that they will favor you with while muscling poor bespectacled State out of the way.  See Iraq, Victory in.

And if you're thinking that the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil doesn't have to take a call from, and do the bidding of, Santino, Fredo, or Michaela Trump, well, brother, you're going to be shot out of the saddle, because you're about as indispensable to the Grifter-in-Chief as Rudy Giuliani.

Beloved theatergoer and baseball fan Mike Pence says that Tillerson is qualified because he's a great negotiator.  Whether all those oil deals prove to be good, bad, or indifferent remains largely unknown.  The answer depends on a combination of luck, hunches, and the future prices of various types of energy.  In any case, those deals all came down to dough.  Guess what: that's not how it works when the sign in front of you reads UNITED STATES and not EXXON-MOBIL.

How on earth is Tillerson supposed to balance support for Taiwan against enlisting Chinese help to stop North Korea?  Dumping the Iran nuclear deal versus protecting tens of thousands of Boeing jobs?  Balancing concerns about energy supply and human rights in places like Angola?  Actually, we're just pumping your derrick: you know where Tex-Rex is going to come out with that one.

Memo to Foreign Service Officers: be careful what you tell Tillerson

The only solace we can wring from this calamitous nomination is the prospect of Tillerson facing off against Deputy Secretary of State Dr.  John Bolton Strangelove.  Bolton is an old bureaucratic player comfortable with fucking anyone he doesn't like in the back channel.  Will Tillerson figure it out?

The next-to-most-recent time the Presidency was entrusted to a Republican manifestly not up the job, the State Department was torn to shreds between the devious, paranoid Al Haig and the reactionary boob sent to babysit him, a former state judge from Reagan's California kakistocracy.  We remember how Judge Clark and his fellow red-hots thought that they could stop a Russian oil pipeline by yelling, screaming, and threatening European allies as if they were subordinates who could be booted out at whim.  It didn't go so well.  It took George Schultz years to clean up the mess, by which time St. Ronald Reagan and his BFF Mikhael Gorbachev had agreed to destroy their nuclear arsenals.

If our Senate had regard for anything except passing tax cuts for the rich and destroying health care for the poor (hi, Ambridge!), it would send this toxic nomination up the pipe and flare it off.  Instead, we suspect that Tillerson will be narrowly confirmed to take his place as another piece of unqualified and crazy that will make the next four years a burning clown car if we are lucky.  And if we are not, no one will be left to tell the tale.