{"id":124,"date":"2017-11-28T20:56:21","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T01:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/?p=124"},"modified":"2017-11-28T21:37:04","modified_gmt":"2017-11-29T02:37:04","slug":"why-a-protocol-officer-is-a-good-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/2017\/11\/28\/why-a-protocol-officer-is-a-good-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Why a Protocol Officer is a good idea …"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Trump <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let’s say you’re the President of the United States.\u00a0 And let’s say that you’re hosting an event at the White House to honor some Word War II vets who happen to be Native American,\u00a0 What would you think the focus of such an event should be?<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Honoring the aforementioned vets for their service<\/li>\n
  2. Using the event to take pot shots (complete with ethnic slurring) at a political opponent who is in no way connected to the event being held, or<\/li>\n
  3. Causing discomfort to the honorees by holding the event in a location prominently featuring the portrait of a man who was responsible for much suffering and death amongst Native Americans during his Presidency.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If you’re most people, you’d go with #1.\u00a0 But President Trump is not most people.\u00a0 Any honoring that got done at the event was overshadowed by #s 2 and 3.<\/p>\n

    We can be generous and write off #3 – holding the event in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, he of Trail of Tears fame and a true bigot when it came to native Americans – as cluelessness rather than malice.\u00a0 The problem is, professional administrations have protocol offices to look out for these kinds of things.\u00a0 Apparently, Mr. Trump doesn’t\u00a0 feel the need to avail himself of a competent protocol officer..<\/p>\n

    That’s just stupid.\u00a0 You end up with a gaffe that could have been easily avoided, but wasn’t – because you couldn’t be bothered to take basic steps to prevent it.<\/p>\n

    The pot-shots are another story entirely.\u00a0 Referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (who claimed a bit of Cherokee in her ancestry) as Pocahontas (a\u00a0Powhatan) while celebrating the Navajo Code Talkers of WWII was simply an exercise in pettiness.\u00a0 Again, this is where a protocol officer could have helped – assuming they could have kept the President on-script (a questionable assumption at best).\u00a0 The use of “Pocahontas” was intended as a derogatory term\u00a0 – who in their right mind thinks that is appropriate when honoring Native Americans?\u00a0 More importantly, the whole affair had the effect of taking the focus off of the veterans being honored, and turning it on to Mr. Trump.<\/p>\n

    Which is a waste, because those gentlemen deserve to be honored.<\/p>\n

    Get a good Protocol Officer, Mr. Trump – and let them do their job.\u00a0 It’ll help turn down the stupid coming out of your White House.\u00a0 A little.\u00a0 I hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Let’s say you’re the President of the United States.\u00a0 And let’s say that you’re hosting an event at the White House to honor some Word War II vets who happen to be Native American,\u00a0 What would you think the focus of such an event should be? Honoring the aforementioned vets for their service Using […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129,"href":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampoutstupid.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}