Does “character” count? How about the more archaic notion of “reputation”? Not in the Obama administration, now standing tall behind what in Washington parlance is called the “troubled” nomination of Brett McGurk to be U.S. ambassador to Iraq. McGurk’s nomination foundered last week after the surfacing online of a tawdry series of private emails between McGurk, then married and the top U.S. negotiator of the U.S.-Iraq security agreement, and Gina Chon, then a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Baghdad. Their subject? Sex and sensitive information, and the pair’s mutually titillating practice of horse-trading both.

If I think back to my Victorian novel class in college, I find the perfect word for what the 2008 exchange reveals about the temperament and judgment of the man whom the administration and diplomatic establishment have unreservedly endorsed for promotion: unseemly.