As expected, retired Marine General and former military head of NATO James Jones is leaving as National Security Advisor.
I’ll bet a bar tab at Kelly’s Irish Times on this; his replacement will be a complete rolling trainwreck. The thing is – you can have a trainwreck at the EPA and the nation will survive – but a trainwreck of a Nat’l Security Advisor gets people killed and puts a nation at risk.
Gen. Jones’s replacement; Tom Danilon. His background? Well, the French have a good word for him; fonctionnaire.
He has also served in policy roles, working as assistant secretary of state for public affairs and as former Clinton secretary of State Warren Christopher’s chief of staff. In that role, Donilon was intimately involved in many major foreign policy issues, including negotiating the Bosnian peace agreement and the expansion of NATO.
He was a registered lobbyist from 1999 through 2005, and his sole client was Fannie Mae.
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Senior Aide, Sen. Joseph Biden’s Presidential Campaign; Senate Majority’s National Security Advisory Group (2005 to 2007).
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Donilon worked as a member of President Barack Obama’s transition team, where he vetted potential State Department officials. Since then, he has become a key National Security Council aide, helping craft Obama’s temporary surge of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.
His brother is Michael C. Donilon, a counselor to Vice President Joseph R. Biden. His wife, Cathy Russell, is Jill Biden’s chief of staff.
Worse than that, he is a party hack fonctionaire with a whiff of nepotism about him. Ponder the pedigree.
– Warren Christopher was one of the worst SECSTATEs this century.
– He worked for six years solely lobbying for one of the institutions that is primarily responsible for the economic straits we are in now as a facilitator of the mortgage crisis.
– He was on point when the Democrats in the Senate declared that “the Iraq War is Lost” and did everything they could do to undermine the military’s drive to achieve the victory we now have in Iraq.
– Close to the VP. The one whose answer to Iraq was to cut it into three parts then run away.
– His experience in Afghanistan – or any of our wars that is – is a 6-hour low pass over Afghanistan last Spring.
So, there you go. It isn’t just me though, Bob Woodward in his book Obama’s Wars
The Pentagon also had concerns about Donilon. When criticism of Jones had reached a high-water mark the previous year, Gates had decided to publicly embrace him. “I think of Jim as the glue that holds this team together,” Gates told The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, whose “Jim Jones’s Team” ran prominently on the op-ed page.
Gates did this in part, he told an aide, because he did not think Donilon would work out as Jones’s successor. Gates felt that Donilon did not understand the military or treat its senior leadership with sufficient respect. The secretary later told Jones that Donilon would be a “disaster” as Obama’s national security adviser.
Yep. Elections have consequences.
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