Streetwise Professor

There have been some embarrassing Secretaries of State.  Warren Christopher comes to mind.  But I am hard pressed to name one more embarrassing than John Kerry.  They say he looks French, and damned if he isn’t trying to act the part, with his current World Wide Surrender Tour and all.  He has basically begged the NoKos and the Iranians to play nice, despite threats of launching thermonuclear war, and he and Obama make me cringe with their attempts to pacify Putin over the Magnitsky List.  John “Kick Me” Kerry seems an apt sobriquet.

But he totally topped himself when he blamed dropping numbers of Japanese students in the US on . . . guns.  No.  Seriously:

Students in other countries assessing where to study abroad are increasingly scared of coming to the United States because of gun violence, the nation’s top diplomat said Monday.

Speaking with CNN foreign affairs correspondent Jill Dougherty in Tokyo, Secretary of State John Kerry said he’d discussed the situation with officials there who said students felt unsafe in the United States.

“We had an interesting discussion about why fewer students are coming to, particularly from Japan, to study in the United States, and one of the responses I got from our officials from conversations with parents here is that they’re actually scared. They think they’re not safe in the United States and so they don’t come,” Kerry said.

So the statement about “other countries” is based on one: Japan.  And that is based on “responses I got from our officials from conversations with parents” rather than actual, you know, data.

But note: fewer Japanese are studying abroad overall.  The drop is not confined to the US.  Because, well, there are fewer college-aged Japanese.  Go to Japan-it’s an old, old society.  And because the Japanese economy stinks.

And believe me, the US is crawling with foreign students from just about everywhere in the world.  What, they don’t care about guns?

To pile on: to explain a change in something (e.g., a decline in Japanese students in the US) you need to cite to a change in something else.  Are guns something new in the US?  Hardly?  Has there been a rise in gun crime? No: the change in gun crime has been downwards, meaning that under Kerry’s guns-foreign student theory, enrollments should be up.

Actually, the reasons behind this particular idiocy are painfully transparent.  The Obama administration, for some reason known only to itself, has decided to make guns its second term signature issue.  To the extent that they explain the decision to send no high level representative (e.g., Biden, Michelle) to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral as being driven by the fact that this is a crucial period in domestic politics, due to the impending votes on gun control in the Senate.  No, they actually said that: it’s probably a contributing factor, but Obama’s churlishness about giving props to a conservative titan is probably the real reason.  Little people do little things. And Obama hasn’t the stature to see over the soles of Thatcher’s pumps.

I can see the wheels spinning in the little minds at State: “We have to support the President’s anti-gun efforts.  How? How? How? I got it! Some Japanese mother told some flunky at the embassy that she was afraid of all those scary guns in the US.  Let’s go with that!”  Foreign policy conscripted into the service of a small-ball domestic agenda.

Should I mention that by making a big deal of people “running around with guns” Kerry is validating that ignorant fear?  Yes.  I think I should.

By making a big deal of people “running around with guns” Kerry is validating that ignorant fear.

But it’s all in the service of a cause: advancing Obama’s anti-gun agenda.  Talk about diminishing the prestige of the office of Secretary of State, by enlisting it in the service of a floundering domestic political  agenda.

To which I say: What about pressure cookers?