How to fire Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
November 17, 2008 1:46 pm ET by Eric Boehlert
Of course, Clinton has not been tapped for the position, but a number of pundits, in what may be a Beltway first, have wondered out loud about how Clinton would be/could be fired as Secretary of State.
Does that strike anybody else as odd?
I honestly don't know the answer to this question (and yes, i spent the prerequisite 60 seconds Googling it), but who was the last Secretary of State who was even fired? I mean, it doesn't strike me as something that's even come up very often in the last 50 years. Yet for some reason, the chattering class thinks it must be pondered in terms of Clinton.
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It really doesn't matter in today's Modern Times, who the U.S. Secretary of State is. The Office, formerly an important one for reasons of communication and negotiation and Diplomacy in a non-flying non-wireless non-satellite age, is now mostly ceremonial.
U.S. foreign policy (which is always nation-specific, and never general) is made today by three things: Treaty, Trade, and Tourism. What is the State Department's place in those three things? And when all three of those things have broken down, then the matter is generally referred to the Department of Defense, not State.
Besides which, it should be proof enough that the U.S. Secretary of State is largely unimportant and just ceremonial today, by the fact that we have not even had a Secretary of State for the past eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration... have we?