Okay, this one is a bit stale, but I guess I like putting “Jew Joke” in a headline. I was reading Dan Drezner’s 97% merciless takedown of Secretary of State Rex “Wife made me take the job” Tillerson,1 which included a sneer directed at major foreign policy advisors who, like Tillerson, had never met the president prior to their selection—a list that is, says Dan, “short but undistinguished.” The word “short” was linked, and I followed to an Oct. 8, 2010 story by Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, titled “Good Man, Wrong Job Why no one will miss Jim Jones, the departing national security adviser”. Fred retails a plain vanilla tale of “bad fit” without ever convincing me that Jones, a four star with the Marines before he took “the wrong job,” was a “good man” in any meaningful sense of the term.
More to the point, he makes no mention of the stunningly lame Jew Joke that old Jimbo unleashed at a meeting of the—wait for it— Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy.2
Well, as they say in the Corps, “Go big or go home.”
Afterwords
“Good man, wrong job” is what House Speaker Sam Rayburn said of Dwight Eisenhower when he was elected president. I think Sam was wrong about Dwight and that Fred was wrong about Jim.
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- Dan’s “hook” was Tillerson’s comment to the effect that he doesn’t think it’s important for him to talk to the press. Dan’s comment is that, having read Tillerson’s interview with Erin McPike, it’s important that he not talk to the press. ↩︎
- Full text: A Taliban militant gets lost and is wandering around the desert looking for water. He finally arrives at a store run by a Jew and asks for water. The Jewish vendor tells him he doesn’t have any water but can gladly sell him a tie. The Taliban, the jokes goes on, begins to curse and yell at the Jewish storeowner. The Jew, unmoved, offers the rude militant an idea: Beyond the hill, there is a restaurant; they can sell you water. The Taliban keeps cursing and finally leaves toward the hill. An hour later he’s back at the tie store. He walks in and tells the merchant: “Your brother tells me I need a tie to get into the restaurant.” ↩︎
