Final Word from Tuesday, December 9, 2014
John McCain tried unsuccessfully in the Senate last week to have Colleen Bell rejected as Barack Obama's nominee for ambassador to Hungary. McCain said he knows how the game is played and normally doesn't object when a fundraiser is given a diplomatic post as a reward but that Hungary is too important for this. Bad things are happening there, he said, and Ms. Bell's main qualifications are having raised money for Obama and producing the soap opera "The Bold and the Beautiful." She is totally unqualified for the job, he said. McCain didn't mention it, but Obama's two ambassadors to Prague have also had two main qualifications, being friends of Obama and the sons of Holocaust survivors. They might be called Holocaust ambassadors. There's actually an unspoken advantage to appointing people with such low qualifications. Without a familiarity with the language, country or region, they're much less likely to object when the State Dept., CIA and various NGOs do their democracy thing and bring the world to the edge of another war. [Czech Republic nonprofit nongovernmental organizations Viktor Orban]
Glossary of difficult words
soap opera - a television or radio drama series dealing typically with daily events in the lives of the same group of people;
familiarity - awareness, knowledge or experience of or with.