I must admit, he's already worse than even I thought he would be. In the past I've accused Mr. Kerry-Heinz of being the man who knew too little, but it's even worse than I feared, he knows absolutely nothing. This guy has absolutely no business being our Secretary of State, which is, as bizarre as it sounds, most likely precisely the reason that Barry selected him. You see, America's new top diplomat has already exhibited more than just a little confusion as he begins a two-week trip the major focus of which was supposed to be on coalescing international action on Syria not on his inability to pronounce those countries to be involved. Kerry-Heinz, on Monday, was finally able to correctly name Kazakhstan as the venue for multinational talks this week on the Iranian nuclear standoff, five days after a fumble in his first speech as America’s top diplomat appeared to fuse the Central Asian country with its neighbor, Kyrgyzstan.
Speaking in London on the first stop of his inaugural foreign trip as secretary of state, Kerry-Heinz referred to the "P5+1 talks with Iran that take place in Kazakhstan." Tuesday’s meeting in Almaty brings together Iranian officials and representatives of the five permanent members of the Security Council – the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France – plus Germany. During a February 20 speech at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Kerry-Heinz lauded State Department employees who, he said, "support democratic reforms in Kyrzakhstan and Georgia." And in an effort to prevent Kerry-Heinz’s from looking anymore stupid than we all know that he is, the State Department in its transcript of the speech corrected it. Both the department’s transcript and closed captioning on the video clip render the phrase as "support democratic reforms in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia."
Typically, State Department transcripts of briefings and speeches include any errors as delivered, with an asterisk and a correction at the bottom. Kyrgyzstan is a country of 5.5 million people in Central Asia, slightly smaller than South Dakota, and home to the Manas air base, which since 2001 has been an invaluable facility in support of coalition operations in Afghanistan. Kazakhstan is its much larger northern neighbor, four times the size of Texas and with a population of 17.5 million. Neither is a free democracy, although Freedom House in its 2013 annual report grades Kyrgyzstan as "partly free" and Kazakhstan as "not free." Along with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, they made up the Central Asian component of the Soviet Union before its collapse led to their independence as separate sovereign nations. But hey, to guy like Kerry-Heinz that's just trivial 'stuff.'
Before succeeding Hitlery Clinton as secretary of state, the less than brilliant Kerry-Heinz was a longstanding member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, even serving as its chairman for the past four years. Which just goes to prove that the primary qualification for being awarded a committee chairmanship is to simply have the luxury of having been able to hang around forever. Also of note regarding the "Kyrzakhstan" slip was the fact that most of our state-controlled media outlets reporting on the speech failed to mention it at the time, or since, although the speech was pretty widely covered. A university spokesman said Monday that 68 media credentials had been issued for Kerry’s speech. Kerry’s gaffe did make headlines in Kyrgyzstan, however, noted both by the independent AKI Press agency and also by the national Kabar news agency, which ran a Voice of Russia dispatch on the issue.
Picking up on that report, national radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh commented during his show, "Can you imagine if George W. Bush had done this? Here it’s Monday and we’re just now finding out about this. This happened five days ago." As many of you can remember, President Bush was frequently mocked for verbal gaffes, including some relating to geography and foreign general knowledge. While running for the presidency he called Greeks "Grecians" and was derided for being unable to name leaders in four hotspots – Pakistan, India, Taiwan and Chechnya. In 2001 he described Africa as "a nation that suffers from incredible disease." Stories about Bush stayed in the news for days, sometime weeks at a time. This would be funny if it weren't so serious, because every time Kerry-Heinz makes himself a laughing stock it makes America just a little less credible. And thus, things get just get a little more dangerous.
And Barry "Almighty" has also made his fair share of stupid gaffes that make him, too, pretty hard to take seriously as a supposed world leader. Visiting Burma last November he repeatedly mispronounced the name of Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the world’s most famous human rights figures. Standing alongside a woman he called "an icon of democracy," Barry called her Aung Yan Suu Kyi four times. And it will come as no surprise that the White House transcript didn't reflect the error. A year earlier, Barry referred to an attack on "the English Embassy" in Tehran before correcting himself and adding, "the embassy of the United Kingdom." England is a component of Great Britain and has not maintained its own diplomatic missions for centuries. And as we remember, he also made the claim that there were 58 states and that Hawaii was part of Asia.
It's sad, but whenever you have someone as inept as Kerry-Heinz so obviously is, and in the position that he's now in, it just makes it all that much more difficult for America to have any sort of a positive influence in a world that becomes more dangerous every single day. And he is a direct reflection of the president that he serves. And I tell you something else, if the world does in fact descend into the chaos that is now being predicted by so many, in whatever world history it is that may some day be, eventually, written, it will very clearly show that it was the election of one particular American president that can be said to have marked the point at which that chaos, while it had already begun prior to his election, accelerated considerably. By his essentially reducing America to a paper tiger he made it possible for those eager to fill the void left behind, free to exert their own less-than-positive, and less freedom supporting, influence.
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