Soccer Mom Clearly Overmatched by That Foreign Diplomat Thingy

Most people know by now that Bush has brilliantly decided to send – please be sure you’re sitting down – another good friend of his, with no fucking experience whatsoever…to a high profile, essential position dealing with our national security.

This time his good friend just so happens to be the walking PR bullshit factory with the best goddamn chicken pot pie this side of Fort Worth – Karen Hughes.

She’s been asked to lead an effort in the Middle East to improve the U.S. image in that region which happens to be currently buried 12 feet under the latest car bomb rubble in Falluja.

Because after all, it’s obvious that the single best person to change the hearts and minds of one of the most war-torn regions, fraught with sophisticated hostilities dating back several millennia is a soccer mom from West Texas.

Hughes’ experience as a diplomat or foreign relations specialist? Zero.

Well, she went to Cancun once in her early twenties and scored a couple free Margaritas for showing her boobs during happy hour at Senior Frogs, but that’s about it.

The Boston Sunday Globe did a piece yesterday on how well the mini-van driving, international relations expert was doing in the region, and specifically had this to say:

“Karen Hughes, President Bush's new public diplomacy czar, faced tough crowds on her first trip to the Middle East last month. While she defended US policies during stops in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, she was met with angry questions about the Iraq war.

On Friday, Hughes drew fire in Indonesia when she said that the Iraq war liberated the country from a dictator who ''gassed hundreds of thousands of his own people." She issued a correction hours later. Saddam Hussein is accused of gassing 5,000 Iraqi Kurds.

Opinion polls across the Muslim world suggest that favorability ratings of the United States have dropped into the single digits after the Iraq war, even in friendly countries like Egypt and Jordan, where the United States spends millions in aid.

The Bush administration has devoted $670 million this year and unprecedented political heft to the public relations effort by appointing Hughes, one of Bush's closest advisers, as undersecretary for public diplomacy. Dina Powell, an Egyptian-American and former White House aide, is her deputy. But the effort is tripping on some of the Bush administration's own hawkish rhetoric designed for an American audience, according to critics of the campaign.

''We're stepping on ourselves every day," said James Zogby, president of the Arab
American Institute, a Washington-base nonpartisan political research group. ''The domestic message ends up trumping the public diplomacy message every time."

Zogby went on to say that Hughes' strategy of baking "freedom gingerbread men" for the angry crows might work if she went a bit less on the butter.

Read more about the Hughes experiment here.