(Links to Diaries 1 & 2 at the bottom) I'm sure everyone but me already knew this. Apparently kooky oligarch and Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina was a member of a State Department committee in 2008 under Condoleeza Rice called the "Advisory Committee on Transformational Diplomacy," in which she advised Rice as part of the "Transformational Diplomacy Working Group."
Rice articulated the mission of this committee as figuring how to "forge a partnership between our civilians and our military." The other members of the committee: Kenneth T. Derr, James J. Mulva, Newt Gingrich, Jennifer Dunn, and John Breaux. Two Big Oil executives (Derr being from Halliburton and Chevron, Mulva from ConocoPhillips), two Republican politicians, and one conservative, corrupt Louisiana "Democrat."
Yep: Clearly a wide variety of highly informed and non-ethically-compromised opinion. And since Derr and Mulva are oil executives, they were doubtless qualified to talk on "forging partnerships" between civilians and the military (which is known as 'fascism' in some cultures).
Not that this is any great revelation - it's just an amusing tidbit I ran across in my canvass of the State Department archives, trying to compile my full list of Bush appointees. So far I'm about 80% (I hope) through State, and will soon be moving on to the next Department, though I haven't decided which (so I put the question in the diary poll). State is the first agency whose Bush appointee list I will have completed, so the task is still huge - and freaking galactic in light of the fact that the list is just a prelude to background research for my book.
I find I'm bothered by something suprising: The State Department had a lot of highly qualified, apparently apolitical people even under Bush, so I find myself sometimes questioning whether I would be doing some of them a disservice by putting them together in a publicized list with the likes of John Bolton and Cofer Black. If my efforts are completely successful and I achieve the definitive historical work on the Bush regime, will I harm some of their reputations unduly by calling attention to their work under Bush, when some of them have had a distinguished record well before and after?
But I've decided that this question is for later, when I'm looking closely at events, and right now it's perfectly acceptable to start answering "Who" before answering the "What." In other words, my job at the moment is to provide a historical resource for my project (which I intend to share with Daily Kos) by compiling this list, and then I and the community in general - and history even more generally - can look more closely and judge in each individual case whether someone was a regime toady, a careerist weasel, or someone who was really trying to defend their patch of the US government from barbarian invasion.
On a separate topic, I watched Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, and it filled me with conviction that my work was important. Watching the kangaroo court judge shrilly denounce and childishly insult Scholl - which was a scene carefully researched by the filmmakers - I couldn't help thinking of John Bolton, or any of the other bullying, psychotic maniacs who comprised the Bush regime.
This isn't Godwin: No one in their right mind would equate these douchebags with Nazi Germany - it was more like a Latin American dictatorship acted out by cowardly but homicidal 12-year-olds. But they're same damn people in every country, these scum who crave power as the only value, hate mankind, and think they can terrorize everyone into doing anything they say.
Nor am I comparing myself to the White Rose for writing a book after the fact about criminal cowards who probably wouldn't have gone after me even when they were in power, but I see the example and know it is my responsibility - my duty - to write this book. Because I know those people - that same ilk of inhuman trash who beheaded that girl, her brother, and her friends for simply speaking their minds - are still out there, and in our country they're Republicans. We know they would do exactly that kind of thing if they thought they could get away with it, and will do it if they get away with the horrors they've already perpetrated.
So I approach this book as an objective history, but what I already saw with my own eyes all but guarantees any such thing would be an indictment for all time. It will be a call for justice, all the louder for being so quiet and factual, and I will seek to make it a foundation from which others can pursue the truth.
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Previous installments in this series:
Book Project Diary 1: Awed By The Magnitude
Book Project Diary 2: Feeling Like A Schmuck