Israel Matzav: This is not a parody: Obama's nuclear negotiator pleads with Israel to stop making talks harder

Sunday, February 23, 2014

This is not a parody: Obama's nuclear negotiator pleads with Israel to stop making talks harder

We've already established that President Hussein Obama's chief nuclear negotiator, Wendy Sherman, is an incompetent hack, who is in way over her head.

Sherman is a total incompetent who is in way over her head. In fact, one has to wonder whether the real reason that Kerry rushed to Geneva last weekend was because the administration has no confidence in Sherman, who is nothing but a hack. Here's Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.

In 1988, the former social worker ran the Washington office of the Dukakis campaign and worked at the Democratic National Committee. That was the year the Massachusetts governorcarried 111 electoral votes to George H.W. Bush's 426. In the mid-1990s, Ms. Sherman was briefly the CEO of something called the Fannie Mae Foundation, supposedly a charity that was shut down a decade later for what the Washington Post called "using tax-exempt contributions to advance corporate interests."

From there it was on to the State Department, where she served as a point person in nuclear negotiations with North Korea and met with Kim Jong Il himself. The late dictator, she testified, was "witty and humorous," "a conceptual thinker," "a quick problem-solver," "smart, engaged, knowledgeable, self-confident." Also a movie buff who loved Michael Jordan highlight videos. A regular guy!

Later Ms. Sherman was to be found working for her former boss as the No. 2 at the Albright-Stonebridge Group before taking the No. 3 spot at the State Department. Ethics scolds might describe the arc of her career as a revolving door between misspending taxpayer dollars in government and mooching off them in the private sector. But it's mainly an example of failing up—the Washingtonian phenomenon of promotion to ever-higher positions of authority and prestige irrespective of past performance.

Now, this complete failure has come to Israel to urge our government not to make 'negotiations' with Iran 'harder.'

In what appeared to be a warning to Israel, she said the United States hopes no one will interfere with the talks.

"We don't enter these talks with rose-colored glasses and we don't know yet if we can resolve this diplomatically," Sherman said, according to Haaretz.

"It will be critical that our negotiators and partners have the space to get this done diplomatically. The talks with Iran will be very hard and we can't afford to make it even harder."