Remember when the Obama administration was going to be stacked with reality-based experts and technocrats? When every communique and memo would be circle within a circle within a circle, carefully restoring the US's global image one nuanced gesture at a time? Turns out it's just a bunch of Chicago politicians appointing their cronies:

The selection of Mr Susman, a lawyer and banker from the president's hometown of Chicago, rather than an experienced diplomat, raises new questions about Mr Obama's commitment to the special relationship with Britain. American commentators denounced the selection of a rich friend to the plumb post, regarded as one of the most prestigious in the president's gift, as worthy of a "banana republic"... Critics said that it would have been more appropriate to dispatch a high profile diplomat at a time when there are fears in British government that Mr Obama is not as attached to the special relationship as his predecessors. And they pointed out that there is little difference between handing a major diplomatic post to a fundraiser and the "pay to play" scandal in which disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich apparently auctioned off Mr Obama's senate seat to the highest bidder. Mr Susman's reputation for hoovering large amounts of cash from deep pockets saw him nicknamed "the vacuum cleaner" when he raised more than $240million for John Kerry's White House bid in 2004. He was one of Mr Obama's biggest campaign cash "bundlers", fundraisers who collect contributions from hundreds of others. He also gave $300,000 to the president's inauguration fund. Jim Nuzzo, a former White House aide to the first President Bush whose elder son is educated in Britain, told The Sunday Telegraph: "He has paid and now he gets to play in London."

File this wherever you keep Obama's aggressively obtuse insults to India and the Philippines after his election and inauguration. For all his talk about extending open palms to global partners he certainly seems selective. Though in fairness the US-British relationship isn't exactly what it used to be. MR reader Jerry emailed me a while back with this gem of an anecdote:

Posting this comment under a different nickname to protect my sources (I am a regular poster), but while attending a well known military airshow in the UK, I was enquiring why the latest US warplanes were not flying for very long and being accompanied by a chase plane. The response I was given (later confirmed by another intelligent well connected level headed individual) was that the US Government & Military no longer trust Great Britain as an ally. In the event the aircraft crashed before, during or after the airshow, the (armed) chase plane was there to totally destroy the wreckage so that it did not fall into the wrong hands. Who or what 'wrong' referred to I do not know.

But I got the distinct impression that Obama was going to fix that. Or at the very least not make it worse.

At least this time he picked one of his own fundraisers for a high-level diplomatic post. Have all the politicians that Dubai and Saudi Arabia bought and paid for already been assigned?

References and previously after the jump...