Category: US Government

President Obama Tells New Korean Ambassador To Eat A Lot of Bulgogi

| October 26, 2014

I think it is pretty accurate that President Obama has a close relationship with a the new US Ambassador to Korea:

U.S. President Barak Obama made a surprise appearance at the swearing-in ceremony Friday of new U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert in a show of his closeness and friendship with the new envoy, officials said.

Obama showed up at the end of the ceremony at the State Department, South Korean Ambassador to Washington Ahn Ho-young said during his own reception for the new ambassador later in the day. Ahn quoted Obama as telling him, “Give Mark Lippert a lot of bulgogi.” [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Mark Lippert Tapped To Become the Next US Ambassador to South Korea

| May 2, 2014

Congratulations to Mark Lippert for being picked as the next US ambassador to South Korea:

Mark Lippert via Wikipedia.

Mark Lippert, one of U.S. President Barack Obama’s oldest and closest aides, has been nominated to be the United States’ next ambassador to South Korea.
Multiple diplomatic sources say the U.S. government notified Seoul of the impending announcement during President Obama’s visit to the nation last week.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Lippert will replace the current ambassador, Sung Kim, in the second half of the year.  Kim, who’s three-year term is nearing an end, is expected to return to the State Department in September. As for Lippert’s credentials, the 41-year-old is currently Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s chief of staff. At the age of 32, he became the foreign policy advisor to then-Senator Barack Obama.

Four years later he was appointed as National Security Council chief of staff, and in 2012 as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs.  [Arirang News]

You can read more at the link, but reading Lippert’s biography of note is the fact he joined the Naval reserve in 2005 and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as an intelligence officer.  Something that caused some controversy was that while serving on active duty he was accused of still receiving his $147,500 White House salary.  He is also accused of having a history of leaking information to the media to discredit rivals.  This is supposedly why former Defense Secretary Robert Gates did not want him in the Pentagon and he was moved over there after Chuck Hagel took over:

We’re also told that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates was opposed to Lippert’s appointment at the Pentagon and the White House was waiting until Gates was gone. Gates was a staunch defender of Jones and might have held a grudge against Lippert. Also, Gates might have been wary of having someone who is so close to the White House embedded in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, especially one with a history of leaking and insubordination. Republican critics also say he lacks the qualifications for the job of being the Pentagon’s top Asia policy official.

“Lippert is a guy who has no experience working in the Pentagon, no qualifications for leading defense policy on East Asia, and who is super close to the White House,” said one Bush administration Asia official. “Other than that, he’s perfect for the job.” [Foreign Policy]

 

His East Asia experience is studying Mandarin at Peking University as part of his graduate school program at Stanford and then in 2012 when he became the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs at the Pentagon when Secretary Hagel took over.  As far as specific experience with South Korea I have not seen anything.  Overall though if you read about him he is a major insider within the Obama administration, which should mean the Korean government will have someone at the US embassy with ready access to the White House.

It is expected that one of Lippert’s biggest tasks will be to try and get South Korea and Japan to better cooperate with each other politically and militarily.  Good luck with that.

Uncovering Government Travel Fraud

| October 3, 2007

Is there a better agency in the US government than the Government Accountability Office?  The GAO has exposed one of the greatest things that irks me, which is the waste of government money by federal employees, mainly the State Department:

Federal employees wasted at least $146 million over a one-year period on business- and first-class airline tickets, in some cases simply because they felt entitled to the perk, congressional investigators say.

A draft report by the Government Accountability Office, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, is the first to examine compliance with travel rules across the federal government following reports of extensive abuse of premium-class travel by Pentagon and State Department employees.

The review of travel spending by more than a dozen agencies from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006, found 67 percent of premium-class travel by executives or their employees, worth at least $146 million, was unauthorized or otherwise unjustified.

Among the worst offenders: the State Department, whose employees typically fly abroad on official business.  [Hope Yen, AP]

A lieutenant colonel I know who is in the Army, but was attached to the State Department once told me how the team of State Department personnel he once worked with would fly business class wherever they went while he sat in the back in economy class because he worked for the Army.  The State Department employees which many of them are young just out of graduate college types used to laugh at the fact that the older lieutenant colonel had to sit in the back of the plane while the younger State Department employees sat in the front.

It isn’t just planes either there is a lot of waste in the State Department and with the GAO would audit the whole place.  Just look at how Paul Bremer ran Iraq, that will give you an idea how the State Department is run.   I had some dealings with State Department personnel before and needless to say I was not impressed and many of us called them "Trustifarians" because so many of them were young kids just out of grad school that thought they knew it all.   

Just for the record I have flown once in the front of the plane.  The rest of the time I have flown economy.  The only time I have flown in front of the plane was when I went to war.  The planes the military used to deploy soldiers to Kuwait were charter planes.  I was on a chartered United Airlines flight to Kuwait and was given a business class seat and let me tell you it is nice to fly in the front of the plane and the State Department employees obviously know this better than anyone.