Friday, February 19, 2021

A Very Negotiable "Faith"


The magazine of Decision, "The Evangelical Voice For Today," reported in January, 2019 that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's pastor at Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Wichita, Kansas remarked

We love Mike and Susan. Susan is warm and inviting, smart and caring. Both are followers of Jesus. Mike was a small business owner when he served as deacon. He was a humble, competent and hard-working man who cared about his employees, his family and his church.

The truth, not so much.  According to The Washington Post. after an interview with NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly in January, 2020, Pompeo launched a profane tirade in which

“He asked me, ‘Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?’ ” she continued. “He used the f-word in that sentence and many others. He asked if I could find Ukraine on a map. I said yes; he called out for his aides to bring him a map of the world with no writing, no countries marked. I pointed to Ukraine; he put the map away. He said, ‘People will hear about this.’ ”

Despite an email chain which preceded the interview, Pompeo "accused Kelly of having 'lied to me, twice,' first in setting up the terms of the interview and then again in agreeing to keeping the 'post-interview conversation' off the record. "  Moreover

The statement ended with a vague, unexplained assertion — “It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine” — that seemed to imply Kelly, who holds a master’s degree in European studies from Cambridge University, got her geography wrong.

A week after the election, Pompeo was asked by a reporter at a news conference "is the State Department planning to engage with the Biden transition team...?  He responded in part "there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump Administration." That didn't happen.


 

Moreover, now-private citizen Mike Pompeo is not done. 

The article itself to which Pompeo helpfully linked described the podcast hosted by Ben Rhodes, who served in the National Security Council under President Obama, in which

Rhodes speculated on what drives Netanyahu’s world view: “Maybe the view is, ‘Jews have been screwed throughout history, by a corrupt cruel world. And so you know what, we just have to be corrupt and cruel ourselves. That’s the only way to survive in this world.’”

Yet for Pompeo, that somehow became Rhodes stating "all Jews are 'corrupt and cruel.'"

The fawning article in Decision was entitled "Mike Pompeo's Non-Negotiable Faith."  It seems, though, that Mike Pompeo's most abiding faith is in (pardon the redundancy) deceit and Donald Trump.   

 


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