“There are too many drunks around town starting rumors,” he said, reacting to published reports there that he was leaving in July.<\/P><\/p>\n
Blankenship, a Florida investment banker and former director of a Jacksonville veterinary clinic, has been critical of the local government, calling, for example, for investigating the bona fides of the Bahamian police. The government has accused him of meddling.<\/P><\/p>\n
“There are those that will complain and say that I am meddling,” he told the Guardian earlier this year, “but this is a free country and we can speak our minds. I am thick-skinned and I have learned to ignore . . . idle chatter.”<\/P><\/p>\n
Well, somebody wasn’t ignoring it. Blankenship quit on June 5 and should be arriving back in Florida today. Asked whether Blankenship had been yanked out of the job, a senior administration official said: “Let’s just say he came to the conclusion that his service to the nation had run its course.”<\/P><\/p>\n
Another ambassador and GOP fundraiser, Earl N. Phillips Jr. of High Point, N.C., left last month after serving a little more than a year as ambassador to the Eastern Caribbean.<\/P><\/p>\n
Come winter, these two postings might look pretty good.<\/P><\/p>\n
By Al Kamen, Washington Post<\/B><\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Diplomatic movement. “No, I’m not leaving anytime soon,” ambassador to the Bahamas and big-time GOP contributor J. Richard Blankenship told the Nassau Guardian on May 30.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243757\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}