Having driven the Kansas budget into a ditch by taking all of the Republican trickle-down nonsense conservative think tanks have long been demanding and stupidly putting it into practice, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is getting the hell out of Dodge—well, Topeka—and the $1 billion budget shortfall his policies created. After being reelected last November despite all of that, he’ll be quitting the job early and fleeing the state in the only getaway car he or Trump could come up with.
I mean, this is just sad.
President Donald Trump announced Brownback’s appointment as ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom Wednesday evening. Brownback had long been expected to be named to the post.
So, not even an ambassadorship to an actual country, but an ambassador-at-large position for the abstract concept of "religious freedom", Republican-style. Sam Brownback, hapless destroyer of conservative economic propaganda, is now going off to stump for a new version of “religious freedom” that, no doubt, conspicuously leaves out every other world religion but his own.
But really, this is just pathetic. It's long been known that the now-despised Brownback was trying to get out of Kansas and his governorship, but to go from a governorship to this? That’s embarrassing even in the context of wingnut welfare. Donald Trump has hundreds of administration positions to fill, and this is the best anyone was willing to do for the Kansas Destroyer?
While instinct suggests that this is the last we will be hearing from the terrible Sam Brownback for a while—the position is, shall we say, not exactly high-profile—we should have faith in the man. There's absolutely no way he can manage to get through a tenure as a "religious freedom" ambassador without fucking it up entirely, this time on the world stage instead of within the confines of a single state, and so will no doubt be back in the news sooner than any of us expect.