This was so predictable

Take a look at an article about Karen Hughes entitled "Out to pasture":

...Hughes failed in an assignment for which she had little experience, since her expertise is not foreign affairs, but domestic political campaigns. Despite her confidante status with the president and access to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, she never really succeeded in her job. Her first failure was not sufficiently making the administration realise that foreign public opinion must be taken into serious consideration in decisions pertaining to America’s role in the world. Public diplomacy, to paraphrase Edward R Murrow, head of USIA during the Kennedy administration, has to be there at the take-off, not at the crash landing. With Hughes, however, it remained essentially a footnote to actions the administration took without substantive thought to the reactions of the rest of mankind. The US did what it wanted, no matter how “they” overseas reacted to “us” in the homeland. Our aggressiveness in the Middle East - and most recently toward Iran - is but one indication of this arrogant attitude.
...
Hughes’s third failure - and that of the administration she serves - is perhaps her worst. It is that American public diplomacy - at its best, an effort by the US to show respect to the opinions of mankind and engage in a global dialogue - has become perceived worldwide as the basest form of propaganda. The educational exchange programmes and cultural presentations Hughes supported are all to the good, but with her public diplomacy justifying policies that much of the world finds appalling, she diminished whatever value public diplomacy can have in advancing US national interests and international understanding.

Would somebody please put a non-partisan career diplomat in charge of this sort of thing?