Obama nominates fundraiser to Paris post

[DFW]

13. As someone directly affected by this kind of appointment, I'm pissed

Calls for a career diplomat (and a good one, not a State hack) are correct. Just because Bush Lite appointed an total oaf, with a wife who kept harassing a diplomat friend of mine (ambassador from another NATO country) because he didn't have a picture of Bush on his piano in his Embassy Residence. He explained that his piano only had photos of those heads of state under he had served personally, which is why there was a pic of him and Bill Clinton. My friend happens to be the finest Foreign Service Officer of ANY country (including ours, I'm sad to say) I ever met, and I cringed when he told me of the Bush hack's wife harassing him to put a photo of Bush on the piano.

I realize it is SOP to appoint political friends and big fundraisers to posts like Paris, London and Berlin, but I think of guys like Phil Lader, who did us proud as our ambassador to Britain under Clinton, and get steamed when I think of how often the people in these posts are NOT qualified to assume them. In the case of unqualified hacks, the underlings do all the work, of course, but the ambassador to a post like that is not, or shouldn't be, a ceremonial job.