A churchy group in New York is giving former fattie diplo Mike Pompeo a "human rights" award: does he deserve it?
The peripatetic Yank may have trimmed one bottom line, but also seems pretty focused on fattening another.
MARCH AIR RESERVE BASE, CALIF. — Let’s face it: it’s not politically correct to call someone fat, certainly not when they were but are not now. So rare kudos to discredited American politician Mike Pompeo, who was once a bona fide fatso. Because judging by his latest appearance on Fox News*, giving wrong opinions about what Trump should do about troubled, corrupt Ukraine, the guy’s gone from embarrassingly corpulent to a scrawny “Oh my God, can somebody please feed that dude?”
Ah, God. She sees it all, doesn’t She? Yes, God is a woman, and her name is Taylor Swift. I mean, if everyone blindly worships you for no clear or really valid reason, that does make you a deity of sorts — at least in the USA.
A few years ago Mr. Pompeo went public with his story of dramatic weight loss — but not everybody bought it. As The Guardian reported, “There’d be little reason to doubt Pompeo if he weren’t also a historically unreliable narrator who has misled the public on everything from his administration’s support of the US’s controversial Afghan exit strategy to the Saudi government’s role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to the overly lavish gifts he received from foreign dignitaries.”
Hmm. Well, apparently the former Secretary of State (from 2018 to 2021) did enough great stuff to be awarded something called the 2025 Athenagoras Human Rights Award, to be awarded this fall in New York City.
Why? Does making appearances on Fox News, that honest-to-goodness champion of real American values, count as advancing human rights? Er…
If you ask what most Americans what comes to mind when they think of Mike Pompeo, it’s probably that time he refused to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, when he still had one. Or for, more recently, being passed over by President Trump, who on November 9 wrote on Truth Social that he would “not be inviting” Mr. Pompeo to be a part of his new, second administration. As I have reported elsewhere, there may be various reasons for that.
But one thing is certain: whether lobbying for a big Japanese steel company or joining the board of directors of Ukraine’s biggest telecom company, the perpetually self-aggrandizing Mr. Pompeo seems to have mastered the art of parleying a few years of public “service” into private gain. As for working hard on “human rights”…yeah, so has Madonna.
Being in the public eye and working for human rights are two different things.
So who is bestowing this award? A NewYork-based group called the Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (save that one for your next spelling bee), says according to its website says that it is “Protecting the Future of Faith.”
Really? Because Americans aren’t supposed to need any external group to protect their faith, or freedom to express themselves, because both protections are enshrined in something called the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. Full stop.
Whose faith, by the way? Presumably Christian. Because other faiths matter less? The fact is some European countries like Germany and France have pretty much moved on from religion (see Revolution, French). You don’t see President Macron handing out awards to American navel-gazers, do ya?
This is not to knock Pompeo’s record as a diplomat — anybody’s is better than the wretched, looney and frankly incompetent Foggy Bottom tenure of self-hating American extraordinaire, Antony Blinken. Diplomats get around, have lots of meetings, photo opps — but last time I checked, Pompeo did zilch to evict Turkish invaders from illegally occupied northern Cyprus. He traveled here and there. Wow. So do millions of other Americans, every day.
America is award-obsessed, which of course diminishes the meaning of every award. But in terms of human rights around the world, my guess is that Taylor Swift has done more than anybody to have emerged from the black swamp that is Washington, D.C. And the girl can barely sing — what a saint!
By the way, we know where JLo went to chill in Crete…do you?