In case you needed another reminder of just how much damage Trump and his groveling Republican enablers are doing to our government, here's a story about State Department staffers being rigorously vetted to measure their personal loyalty to Donald Trump. And they’re being vetted by a Trump-appointed ex-wine blogger, because everything is stupid now.
Mari Stull, a former food and beverage lobbyist-turned-wine blogger under the name “Vino Vixen,” has reviewed the social media pages of State Department staffers for signs of ideological deviation. She has researched the names of government officials to determine whether they signed off on Obama-era policies — though signing off does not mean officials personally endorsed them but merely cleared them through the bureaucratic chain. And she has inquired about Americans employed by international agencies, including the World Health Organization and the United Nations, asking their colleagues when they were hired and by whom, according the officials.
Well that's just lovely. We've got a lobbyist turned wine blogger turned Delores Umbridge wannabe assembling lists of which State Department and international U.S. government employees are sufficiently loyal to the Russian-backed traitor in the White House, and which might need to be purged. It's the sort of thing that would, all by itself, have rated as a mega-scandal in any administration before this one. In this one, though, it's just another episode of wanton crookedness.
This hunt for those personally disloyal to Hair Furor, like those in other departments, is already having significant effects within the government agencies conservatives are trying to wreck. Foreign Policy reports that three deputy assistant secretaries of state are "said to be on the way out"; it's implied that that's because they're fed up with the Trump appointees, not because they're being forced out. And their source suggests "everyone" in the department is similarly "looking to bail."
Because that's the thing with incompetent, ideological, and dim-witted management: it makes the competent people quit in disgust.
That is itself part of the "conservative" plan. Purging the department of longtime and skilled employees gives conservatives more opportunity to utter that this or that government department is "failing," after the department unsurprisingly gets considerably worse at doing its job.
It’s going to take a decade, at least, to recover from this latest bout of conservative incompetence. Thank goodness the State Department doesn’t have any pressing duties in the world, or we’d be seriously up a creek right now.