"… Psaki issued a statement correcting the record on Kerry’s whereabouts off Nantucket.
“While he was briefly on his boat on Wednesday, Secretary Kerry worked around the clock all day including participating in the president’s meeting with his national security council,” she said.
A Kerry aide who was not authorized to speak publicly said the denial on Wednesday was the result of “confusion,” saying Kerry had apparently taken his grandson out for an hour-long sail.
Kerry’s aides bristled at the suggestion that he is simply lounging around, saying he has been working the phones while on vacation with world leaders and participating in White House meetings about the situation in Egypt and a series of other pressing foreign policy challenges.
" Boston Globe
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Rome, er Egypt burned while Kerry fiddled, er sailed off Nantucket. Rich boy stuff,the action of the plaything of a Ketchup widow. I hope she enjoyed the sail.
Kerry, the "war hero," a man who long ago had to speak the truth to the senate even though he did not know the truth and only mouthed words that said nothing of anything he had witnessed. But the words were convenient to him.
A playboy nitwit with intellectual pretensions, everything he has touched as secretary of state has turned to ashes except what's her name. Ah, "Isabel."
Let him be gone. pl
“… Kerry had apparently taken his grandson out for an hour-long sail. ”
Entertaining a child at this time was more important than the interests of the Republic? God help us.
Although I don’t doubt modern communications could allow Kerry to stay in the loop and make whatever calls he had to make away from Washington, his place was in Washington. He should have been visible to the foreign service officers at Foggy Bottom. As a former Navy officer, he knows this. He just chose to ignore this. Colonel Lang’s assessment of this squid’s dick is spot on.
I learned this lesson as a ROTC cadet. We were preparing for an orienteering race when the skies opened up. The officer cadre were in a nearby government Econoline van. MSG Albert H. Rivers immediately bolted out of the van and joined us in the rain. He then told us that when we became officers we better not act like those in the van. If your men are in the shit, you better be there with them.
One dandy Australian politician was famously described as “a soufflé”. John
Kerry sounds the same.
Agreed….this putsch does not appear to be born on the banks of the Nile, nor the Potomac….
DOS appears off course and out of the loop….
Par for the course in Imperial America.
sailing just off of nantucket
his boat paid for by heinz ketchup ducat
once again he’s assailed
for his diplomacy failed
john kerry said, “Well then just #@$% it”
The character of a man is always measured in how he treats others…..one story that floats around the Bay State is that John seems to always get into it with the young men who scrub the decks or handle the lines on Isabel. Nothing or nobody is good enough for John as he has the manners of a gnat.
My mentor’s instructions were to do your best without being a shit, be on time and make time to do more than is required, more than is expected, when given a task by as senior lawyer.
Same thing my father told me.
Who raises and educates these people?
Leave Kerry alone. He did what he does best…do you really want him actively involved?
And in any event…the best you can hope for from the group that runs our foreign policy is that they, studiously, do nothing. It is what they are all most qualified to do.
Well at least he wasn’t hiking the Appalachian trail.
Our bureaucrats should be awake and working 24/7, 365 days a year for as long as they are employed by the federal government. They should also mark the sparrow’s fall.
Yeah, Kerry is an overmatched dabbler, but I would think it more important to discuss the substance rather than the optics. I grant this non-issue fits the mainstream media narrative, but isn’t it beneath this blog?
Herb
“When I want your advice, I’ll beat it out of you.” He was on Nantucket because he had been cut out of deliberations on Egypt in DC. pl
Colonel
Could you elaborate on what you know about the pattern and substance of deliberations “at the highest level” this week? The NYT story today was the usual White House public relations pap, i.e. we did the best we could, the outcome isn’t so bad, and – anyway – it serves Israel’s interests.
mbrenner
To say more would point to my source. pl
Secretary of State is supposed to be a little more significant posiion than Gov. of South Carolina.
Mrs. Kerry in critical condition at hospital.
http://boston.com/metrodesk/2013/07/07/teresa-heinz-kerry-taken-nantucket-hospital-with-unspecified-medical-condition/Yz9LjTfQEmjEnQb210cD7O/story.html
Col Lang
Ever the romantic dare I hope that since Sec of State Kerry was out sailing while the Egyptian government was melting down – could that possibly mean that the Realist are having more real time impact then we might first assess ? Gen Dempsey did set ’em straight on the Syrian no fly zone bad idea. And as yet we have not sortie with the IDF to bomb Natanz (sp ?). I do not want to have another flare up of the dreaded unwarranted optimism disease , but we could be seeing a course correction .
If after so little time, Kerry is already side-lined for incompetence, that is big news, but it doesn’t surprise me. Obama is obviously threatened by capable people with a spine. His picking Kerry (who is neither) is a perfect example. This is the man who picked Biden as his running mate for crying out loud. However, if you have information he Kerry was cut out, that is burying the lede.
Aren’t Andrea Mitchel, Mark Shuster and Anderson Cooper on the yachtsman angle? Faux-populism is their beat. I’m sorry my opinion on the snarky fun and games isn’t lockstep. Just get so damned much of it in our national discourse already.
Obama is said to keep foreign policy more tightly held than any president since Nixon. Clinton for all her star power was often out of the loop. I would not be surprised if this happens to Kerry as well.
Re: the ketchup widow. Apart from Teresa Heinz’s (she only uses Kerry for political purposes, which is interesting) poor taste in second husbands, she seems a pretty decent sort.
All
If she bought Kerry that sloop as a toy, she must be an interesting person. Does anyone know what is wrong with her this time? I have perused a lot of photos of situation room meetings lately and he is not in many of them. pl
She has been under cancer treatment for several years – at least 3 I am aware of. I would imagine that factored into his trip to his Nantucket house. He is now headed off to M.E. if news is correct and recently returned from India.
bth
I am sorry for her illness, as I am sure we all are. That does not change the fact that her husband is an incompetent and not very bright man. Even the Washington Post has turned against him. see their lead editorial today. pl
Heard that the back and forth between Cairo and DC from June 28th to when the army took over was with Susan Rice as the main contact point ( Amb Paterson being the messenger).
Now let’s see when Samantha takes her seat at Turtle Bay , how her relation with Foggy Bottom will be? Will she do the same things that Rice used to do – maintaining a direct line to the WH instead of her boss at Foggy Bottom?
Tyler: Isn’t it plausible deniability? The wheels are coming off in Cairo and any pronoucement by the Imperium will make us look even more ridiculous.
BTW, it’s nice to see that the Egyptian “army”, which has spent 40 years kowtowing to the IDF and the last few years suffocating Gaza, has opted to use its lone skill set: shooting civilians. See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/world/middleeast/egypt.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
All the D.C. careerists will be trying to distance themselves from this debacle as quickly as possible.
As the Colonel has said, Egypt is a mess. Protests and ideology will not feed its teeming millions.
Beaver
Do you have source for that tidbit? This woud explain why he decided to send a deputy to meetings and go sailing with his wife. I doubt that he will be around long. pl
I should have expanded on my comment instead of simply quipping, and for that I apologize.
There is a definite lack of ‘grown ups’ in America’s upper echelons nowadays. While previous generations might had accepted Mubarak by and large as a product of the region and dealt with it, we’ve been obsessed with the idea of ‘democracy as a panacea’. I lay the blame for this at the feet of the idiots who push Blank Slate Theory and believe a little bit of democracy and good government turns everyone into Ohioans. This refusal to grow up and accept that as humans we are flawed and fundamentally different leads us into messes like Egypt and Syria. So one of the lead officials frittering away his time sailboating and -lying- about it is simply more of what we should expect from this Administration, as well as its compliant lapdog press carrying its water.
However, Kerry’s sailboating is indeed preferable to Juan McCain’s response of ‘send in the military for a ground occupation and sprinkle democracy fairy dust over everything’.
Obama restored the U.N. ambassadorship to a Cabinet-level position during his first term.I wouldn’t be surprised if he did that in part to give Rice greater freedom of action and reduce HRC’s authority over her. I’m wondering if, as a cabinet member, Rice would be entitled to go directly to Obama if he permitted her to do so even if she still technically answered to HRC?
I understand Rice is very close to Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama as well. Nice position for infighting purposes.
Mr Brenner
Are you referring to this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/world/middleeast/morsi-spurned-deals-to-the-end-seeing-the-military-as-tamed.html?hp&_r=1&
Wonder who is that Arab FM?
{ His top foreign policy adviser, Essam el-Haddad, then left the room to call the United States ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, to say that Mr. Morsi refused. When he returned, he said he had spoken to Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, and that the military takeover was about to begin, senior aides said.
“Mother just told us that we will stop playing in one hour,” an aide texted an associate, playing on a sarcastic Egyptian expression for the country’s Western patron, “Mother America.”}
Reflects a bit about the scuttlebutt I mentioned below.