Hypocrisy is not an unfamiliar site in the comments of top political officials, but Secretary of State John Kerry really took it to new levels today, complaining it was “inappropriate” for President-elect Donald Trump to publicly criticize internal policy of other nations, after Trump’s comments panning Germany allowing refugees into the country.
That Trump’s comments were the same sort of simplistic distrust of “illegals” copied and pasted onto another country in a totally different situation is all true, though really beside the point, as Kerry’s argument wasn’t that Trump was wrong, rather it was that he should keep his mouth shut.
Which sounds great until you consider every comment John Kerry has made since 2013. Far from following this estimation of what is and isn’t appropriate, the Obama Administration, with Kerry in a key position, has been butting into internal matters of other countries on myriad fronts from day one.
Whether they were telling Lebanon who they should vote for, pushing Japan to abandon decades of pacifism to rearm, mocking the Philippines for electing Rodrigo Duterte, or threatening to punish Britain for voting for the Brexit, the Obama Administration has been constantly sticking its nose into things that were plainly not America’s business.
Trump’s comments by contrast were more or less harmless, since he didn’t condition any US policy on the Merkel government seeing things his way, and he was just expressing an opinion on German immigration policy, risking little but some hurt feelings in Berlin. The most inappropriate comments of all, then, came from Kerry for not recognizing the example his time at the State Department has set.