Alert the the Kennedy School and the Brookings Institution! Resurrect the corpse of John Foster Dulles! American diplomacy is in its death throes!

Four, count ’em four, members of the State Department’s senior management resigned Thursday less than a week into the Trump administration — all this while Secretary of State designate Rex Tillerson was in their Foggy Bottom headquarters looking for his number two. To make matters worse…

The resignations, reported by the The Washington Post, included Patrick Kennedy the agency’s undersecretary for management who had served in the role for nine years. [itals. mine], [snip] “It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry, told The Post.

Four members makes the “single biggest simultaneous departure” that anyone can remember from the State Department and it will be “incredibly difficult to replicate”? Does Mr. Wade exaggerate un peu? His claim looks mighty silly when shown against this organizational chart.

More importantly, though not surprisingly, his biased assessment also ignores Kennedy’s recent history, as does the WaPo’s Josh Rogin, who broke the story as if a tragedy had just occurred and American interests were about to unravel across the globe, undermining the very fabric of Western civilization. Mr. Rogin may have his tragedies mixed up. From the International Business Times of only last October:

Patrick Kennedy, U.S. State Department’s Under Secretary of State for Management, apparently pressured officials to change a “classified” Hillary Clinton email to “unclassified,” according FBI documents released Monday, which included the account told by an official in the FBI records department. The official, whose identity was redacted in the documents, alleged Kennedy proposed a “quid pro quo” deal to a colleague in the FBI’s International Operations Division that would allow the bureau to place more agents in countries where it was currently forbidden in exchange for the shift in classification.

According to Rogin, Kennedy was working hard to keep his job. No wonder he was having difficulties.

Another absurd euphemism — or should I say plain nonsense — in Rogin’s piece is that these people “resigned.” (In today’s Washington Post, reporters seem to be writing to obtain extra Amazon credits from their ultra-liberal boss, rather than doing elementary research.) Meanwhile, from reporting that came out just a few hours later:

“Any implication that that these four people quit is wrong,” a senior State Department official said.… “This is the White House cleaning house.”

As well it should. Of course Kennedy is not alone. The State Department is undoubtedly chock full of those with dirty hands from the Clinton email scandal and its attendant coverup. They’re lucky not to be indicted, assuming they won’t be. And then there’s the Benghazi episode. The degree to which State and Mrs. Clinton colluded with the White House on that one is not yet fully known, despite the hours of testimony. Kennedy was involved in that too, as was Victoria Nuland, who was also let go.

And speaking of dirty hands, the State Department is way past mere fingernail problems, but up to its elbows and neck in the shameful (and still opaque) Iran nuclear deal that bypassed Congress, not to mention the American people, to shovel boatloads of cash to the mullahs who are now busy spending them on such humanitarian enterprises as providing advanced munitions for Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, various homicidal Syrian thugs, and who knows what other crazed Islamist terrorists who are about to drone a shopping mall near you.

No, of all the swamps in D.C. that need draining perhaps the most fetid is the Department of State. It’s been that way for a long time, but has grown even more insular and less transparent, if that were possible, under the leadership of Hillary Clinton and John “Jhen-jhis Khan” Kerry. Listening to their spokespeople is like putting your brain into a cryogenic freezer without hope of ever seeing it again. The White House has a lot more of this housecleaning to do. In the words of the immortal Michael Ledeen, “Faster, please.”

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already.