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Remember Hillary Clinton, our brave and martyred friend, the first casualty in the war against Donald Trump? According to Politico, Clinton has nobly put aside her differences with Trump to help, ah, [checks notes], Mike Pompeo, a torture proponent and Islamophobe, get her old job:



But now that Pompeo faces a tough confirmation process to become secretary of state himself, he has reached out to Clinton and Kerry, as well as every other living occupant of the office, to ask for guidance. Clinton, for one, has been willing to help. “These were lengthy calls seeking advice” from the former secretaries, a person familiar with Pompeo’s prep work told Politico.


According to Politico’s source, Clinton “advised Pompeo to stem the flight of career diplomats who quit under Tillerson.” I mean, duh? This fits with Clinton’s remarks about Pompeo at the women’s coworking space The Wing earlier this month:

“I view it as a national security threat that the State Department has been so decimated, and I don’t know what will happen with the nomination of Mike Pompeo to become the next secretary of state, but the one small glimmer of hope is when he went into the CIA, he only brought two people with him and he really relied on the career intelligence people,” Clinton said. “If he will rebuild the State Department, and start listening to those who have very valuable experience, maybe we can work ourselves out of this hole we’re in,” she continued.


It’s the old resistance canard: That it’s worse for Trump and his cronies to make the government less functional and more chaotic than it is for the fascist #Drumpf regime to have an efficient, well-oiled machine to enact its awful ideas. It is terrible that so many career diplomats have left the State Department but I have no idea how even a fully-staffed department under Pompeo would improve America or the world in the slightest.

Maybe Clinton’s assumption is that, for Pompeo to listen to State Department staffers with experience, he would simply have to stop being so Islamophobic, but that is putting a frankly absurd amount of faith in the persuasive power of career diplomats. (For what it’s worth, the Politico piece provides an equally absurd amount of room for its anonymous source to push Pompeo’s ridiculous spin that he’s “paying special attention to management and morale issues at the State Department,” that he “values each and every person,” and that he loves you and he’ll absolutely be there for your next dance recital.)

But the larger point: Why is Clinton even taking a call from such a monstrous person? Pompeo, as Politico noted, is a man who called Clinton’s response to the Benghazi attacks “morally reprehensible” and went further than many in propagating the ridiculous (and expensive) Benghazi investigation, which was orchestrated solely to undermine Clinton. He’s also a man who defended torturers as “heroes, not pawns in some liberal game being played by the ACLU and Senator Feinstein,” who falsely claimed Muslim American leaders hadn’t condemned the Boston Marathon bombings, and, as the New York Times wrote, who has “ties to individuals and groups promoting a worldview that regards Islam not so much as a religion, but as a political ideology that is infiltrating the United States.” Is there any way that a man like that can work us “out of the hole we’re in?” Obviously not—so why should Clinton help him? Why not call him a bellend and put the phone down—or, at least, tell him you can’t help him, because to help him is to help Trump make the world worse?

Establishment Democrats will never save you. On the whole, with very few exceptions, people who have spent years in Washington are more allied with each other than with the principles they claim to represent or the people they ought to be helping. Don’t expect any better.