If nobody trusts career officials from State, there's your first problem. Despite Ms. Nuland's rather refreshing new take on the concept of "diplomacy" (and before you ask, I like her too, just poking fun), it seems to me your State department tends to have really rather qualified people who do a good job executing American foreign policy. At the head, but in the lower ranks too.

In fairness, it's not like Belgium's ever had real reasons to complain about the American ambassadors (or at least not any time I can recall). It's just silly as I said, is all - and a very blatant reminder of American elections being more about money and less about democracy than we are quite comfortable with. You may prefer these people to be placed abroad instead of internally where they can do more harm, but making the US presidency look like it's for sale does its own kind of harm.

Though maybe people can become ambassadors for other reasons than that too, and Belgium just happens to always get the fundraisers...

Oh no, he was highly entertaining. Certainly far more so than any career diplomat would have been - completely hyper, and on a self-proclaimed mission to visit every single one of the near six hundred municipalities in Belgium to promote America. As I recall, he claims to have done it too, although there was one pesky town somewhere who failed to recollect any such visit (and really, he's not the kind of guy you'd easily forget). Honestly, if the job of an ambassador is to make the ambassador's host country seem like a fun and nice place to be, and to be in the media as much as humanly possible in order to promote that message, you'll have a hard time finding Howard Gutman's equal anywhere. If his job is to make people take his country seriously, well, then maybe not so much, but in fairness, I think the "America can be fun and goofy" message is one Europeans need more than the "America does have competent diplomats, when it can be bothered to waste them on Europe" one.

Eh, we don't much care either way. So far Denise Bauer is proving much less fun, so as far as I'm concerned he could've stayed a while longer, whores or no.