Dick Holbrooke is a Double-Dealing A**hole/Pr*ck

Mickey Kaus a nice take on Henry Kissinger's successor---the overbearing obnoxious party-dude who was sleeping with Diane Sawyer and other DC hotties [I have a list!] as well as being a third-rate Assistant Sec State for East Asia {Senior DepAsstSec Oakbrook used to chide the disheveled bleary-eyed Holbrooke from arriving at the EA staff meetings late only to be clueless on what was going on by saying, "Dick, you haven't been reading the take." Kaus quotes an insider:

Speaking of [Richard] Holbrooke, I have it on good authority that, not only does the former UN ambassador believe that he'll be Secretary of State if either Clinton or Obama wins, he genuinely thinks he'll have a comparable position if McCain wins.

I can personally attest from having two or three dinners with Holbrooke [and ConGen Peter Tarnoff] in Lyon, France that Holbrooke is the biggest prick/asshole outside of Henry the K in the foreign policy universe. He simply hasn't a civil or elegant bone in his body [or as Council on Foreign Relations Chief Les Gelb famously quipped "The rumors that Dick Holbrooke is half Jewish are only half-true."

Lil Bobby Zoellick is a nice Jewish kid from Evergreen Park near Obama's digs in Chicagoland and from my State Dept friends, thinks quite highly of himself. During my short stint at the U. of Chicago, his name came up from time to time. A senior State official told me that he is the smartest FSO with political savvy outside of Nick Burns he's come across in a long time.

But back to the rock-star brownie from Brown RH.

Holbrooke is not only self-centered but a complete sleaze-bag. An UnderSecState once told me that he was waiting outside Henry K's townhouse/office in 1980 cadging for a future job when Henry was Republican John Connelly's [remember him?] foreign policy guru. Everyone thought Connelly was the fire-wall the drive-by media had erected that could avert a Reagan nomination---and Henry the K is nothing if not a subservient tool of the MSMinistry of Agitprop.

Whom did my friend see surreptitiously sneaking past him trying to avoid notice than Richard Holbrooke, ready to switch parties in a nano-second. Sam waved at the non-plussed phoney and said, "Hi Dick," or so my friend Sam claims. [He later got the UnderSecState job in a Reagan Administration.]

Tricky Dicky the Prick [as everyone who knows him well calls him] simply has the loyalty of Benedict Arnold and the morals of Mata Hari. He would sell out his native tribe of obstinate Bedouin apostates in a New York minute to appease the mainline Arabs and exalt his power and overarching megalomania.

All this said, RH is a very clever Machiavellian as well as "Texas Hold 'Em" type Cagliostro.

This is in reference to Mickey Kaus's reference that RH would like to be McCain's SecState as well and probably has lines out in that direction!