What president would be stupid enough to undertake a humanitarian intervention? It might take five years to succeed instead of three and thus be a complete failure, marking its initiator as the worst president in American history. I mean, that's the standard, right?

But the Democrats haven't proposed a bill that even a squish like Peggy Noonan or a good government type like Alice Rivlin can get behind. So there seems insufficient evidence at present that the Republicans won't negotiate or compromise. I at least had not expected that the new Obama foreign policy involved giving the Iranians a week's ultimatum and then cutting off further talks, but that seems to be the Yglesias/DeBoer method of dealing with Republicans.

Why do you say "Huh?" You state that your domestic political opponents do not negotiate in good faith and that there is no point in compromising with them: they are simply an obstacle to be run over. They are irrational people with misguided values that must be reformed by the kind of people who went to Dalton and Harvard. At the same time, you (or Yglesias, anyway) state that we must negotiate with, say, the Iranians, recognizing that our unjust imperialist policies of the past century are the primary cause of the troubles between us. I think those points of view qualify as venomous hatred for your fellow citizens and weepy empathy for foreigners who hate us.

Gee, you might have thought that the one who is going to negotiate peace with Hamas, Iran and North Korea could get in some practice by reaching agreement with a group of people who share his language and culture and live in the same country. But you'd be wrong.

More generally, I'm always puzzled why people like Yglesias and DeBoer are so filled with weepy empathy for foreigners who hate us, and so filled with venomous hatred for their fellow citizens.