Dem
47
GOP
53
Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life. And yet, it seems to be the mission statement of the current State Department. Heck, maybe the entire administration.
This week, the AIDS 2026 conference will be held in Rio de Janeiro. And leading up to that are a bunch of pre-conferences. At one of those pre-conferences, a high-ranking State Department official was delivering a presentation about all the money that the Trump administration might lavish on Africa through PEPFAR (while not mentioning that the DOGEys slashed that budget dramatically). Here is the key slide from the PowerPoint slide show being displayed for the attendees:
Notice anything wrong?
If you answered that last question with "Pretty much everything!" then give yourself a cheroot. The image went viral thanks to conference attendee Emily Bass, who highlighted the map on her blog. Here's her rundown of the problems with the graphic:
The map mis-identified the locations of Cote d'Ivoire, Mozambique, Nigeria by enormous margins—making Nigeria landlocked, Mozambique an east African nation and Cote d'Ivoire a southern African state. The map put Uganda and Malawi in the right vicinity, but with the wrong borders. And it nope'd out altogether for Cameroon, which doesn't have a line connecting the name to a country at all. (There is also a country without a name. Alas, they are not a match.)
That's... a lot of errors.
Spokespeople at the State Department endeavored to blame the mistakes on poor work done by a low-level staffer. But, true to form for the current White House, that is basically a lie. Reuters did an analysis, and it did not take them long to figure out that the map is AI-generated. We can't specifically speak to fat or drunk, but that's certainly lazy. Meanwhile, it's pretty stupid to: (1) fail to notice the obvious sloppiness in the map, (2) fail to double-check to make sure the map is correct and (3) fail to be able to recognize the countries you're talking about. It may have been a low-level staffer who put the slide in the deck but, again, it was a high-level staffer who was giving the talk, and who apparently did not know enough to recognize that all of the countries were wrong.
So, these are the folks who are running foreign affairs for the United States. One can only hope that the Pentagon does ask for help with an invasion. An attack on Iran could accidentally become an invasion of New Zealand. Though maybe State only makes mistakes like that when dealing with sh**hole countries. (Z)