Here are some more bad ideas from what is rapidly becoming a motherlode of them. From The Irish Times:

The Trump administration has vowed to slash the funding of the state department, which manages the US's relations with foreign countries and governments. Mr Tillerson has suggested that the special envoys for climate change and the Iran deal, Afghanistan-Pakistan, disability rights, international labour affairs and for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center, as well as the Northern Ireland role, will be eliminated under the plan. In all, over half the 66 special envoy position are due to be cut.

Why would we need a special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan when we're fixing to send 11,000 more troops there? Or special envoys for such low priority items as disability rights, labor, and the climate crisis, especially now that the president* has gone all the way to Texas to watch hurricane victims on the big-screen electric television machine? But it's the latter one that intrigues us at the moment.

Ireland is caught in a terrible bind over Brexit. As part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland is committed to the results of that dumbass referendum. However, the departure from the EU is a fact, and the UK and the Republic of Ireland are turning themselves inside out over how to handle the border between the North and the Republic. Currently, a "soft" border exists; areas that were once were marked by pure guerrilla warfare now have people walking or driving across as though the island were unified. Brexit is going to make a mess of this, no matter what jerry-rigged system they devise. The peace process in Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement, among other things, were unalloyed triumphs of American diplomacy. We naturally have an interest in them, so why would we possibly need a special envoy to watch over the biggest crisis since the agreement was signed?

Gary Hart would like to know that, too.

Quite unbeknownst to me—and, I suspect to many people—Hart was the last special envoy to Northern Ireland that we had, and he thinks we still have work to do. From The Irish Times:

"This is a secretary of state who seems to be making it up as he goes along," Mr Hart told The Irish Times by telephone from his home in Colorado. "If they look at the UK generally and Brexit, all they see is complications and they run away. "I don't think they want to be engaged and if you get complexities like the Border issue, the last thing that Tillerson wants to worry about is the Border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. It is not on his radar." Mr Tillerson proposed in a letter on Monday to US senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the US senate committee on foreign relations, that the role of "Personal Representative for Northern Ireland Issues" be "retired". The highest-ranking US diplomat justified ending the role telling Mr Corker in his letter that "the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has been implemented with a devolved national assembly in Belfast now in place". No reference was made to the collapse of the power-sharing assembly.

Which brings me to another thing that has bothered the staff of the shebeen for quite a while. Gary Hart knows more about more things than almost any other Democratic politician alive. He was talking about an infrastructure crisis when he ran for president 33 years ago. An actual functioning Homeland Security department was his idea.

Yet he's virtually invisible in the national dialogue. Attributing this to one conspicuous indiscretion makes one a prude or a fool. N. Leroy Gingrich, for one, had enough personal problems to fill out a season of Days Of Our Lives all by his lonesome, and you can't swing a cat in a green room without hitting him, and his latest wife is off to the ambassador to the Vatican. And let's not forget the track record of the guy who currently sits in the office for which Hart's misstep permanently disqualified him, god knoweth why. A country that wastes Gary Hart is a country that's forgotten value in its public servants, or traded it for empty celebrity. And he's right about Ireland, too.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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