Hippie Shit

One thing about being on The Left is that a standard rhetorical cudgel is painting all your ideas as childish, naïve, utopian. And then ideas like, "we will blow the shit out of Iraq, send some 24-year-old Heritage flunkies in to run the place, and the flowers of Democracy will bloom," get treated as hard-headed Very Serious Realism.

For years, people have been begging the United States to reevaluate its relationship with Saudi Arabia. So often, the West has seemed to willfully overlook the abuse of the Saudi government — in the bombing of Yemen (one of the poorest countries in the world), the jailing of activists, mass executions, and the surveillance and kidnapping of critics abroad, including Jamal. Those of us concerned about Saudi Arabia’s disregard for human rights were told by the foreign policy “adults in the room” in Washington that we needed to be realistic — that realpolitik and national security interests had to take precedence over human rights.

Don't know how many times the Very Serious People have to fuck everything up before this changes. Infinity times, probably!