Getting Out While She Still Can

So Karen Hughes has had enough and is going home.  (Mark down another departure, James.)  It has been easy to give Karen Hughes a hard time, and it hasn’t really been fair to her.  The administration has made an art form out of cronyism, and the President has chosen some of the most inappropriate people for fairly important tasks based on their close relationship with Mr. Bush.  Rather than a former ambassador or someone accustomed to the work of diplomacy, Mr. Bush thrust Karen Hughes into a role for which she wasn’t terribly well prepared and which was already going to be monstrously difficult for the most qualified person.  It is some consolation for Ms. Hughes that administration policy had already done so much damage to our international reputation that there really was little that she could do, and so perhaps it is not very surprising that she didn’t try to do very much.