Ambassador of Listening Gets an Earful

As I blogged earlier, Bush’s old Texas political crony Karen Hughes has embarked on a so-called “listening tour” of the Middle East, supposedly to repair the irreparable damage to America’s reputation that has been caused by the noecon regime that we now slave under. As I also mentioned earlier, the whole thing sounds like the old Clinton administration scam of gathering a group of governmental grantees and having them say nice things about their grantors in front of the television cameras. Sure enough, here’s how today’s Washington Post describes how the tour has been arranged:

“Hughes . . . has generally met with polite audiences — many of which consisted of former exchange students or people who have received U.S. funding — during a tour of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey this week.”

But someone is about to be fired for failing to properly screen one particular audience for our Listening Ambassador in Turkey. As described in the Post, “A group of Tukish women’s rights activists confronted Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes on Wednesday with emotional and heated complaints about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq , turning a session designed to highlight the empowering of women into a raw display of anger at U.S. policy in the region.”

“War makes the rights of women completely erased, and poverty comes after war — and women pay the price,” declared one audience member who also denounced “the arrest of Cindy Sheehan . . . in front of the White House.”

This skunk-at-the-garden-party scene was the result of sloppy staff work on the part of some White House staffer. “In this case,” writes the Post, “the U.S. Embassy asked an umbrella group known as Ka-Der, which supports women running for office, to assemble the guest list. None of the activists currently receives U.S. funds or had any apparent desire to mince words.”

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