The Obama administration has announced it will now work with the government in Sudan, the author of what Obama (and countless others) have dubbed genocide. I wonder what George Clooney thinks? Maybe it’s just because today is Cranky Monday, but this seems particularly gross on the heels of Obama getting a Nobel peace prize. Michael Goldfarb has more.

Regardless, the news fits quite well with my cover story in the latest issue of the magazine. Here’s an excerpt that comes after a discussion of then-candidate Obama’s support for American withdrawal from Iraq even if it led to a genocide:

But most fundamentally, what on earth happened to liberalism so that even the self-styled embodiment of not just hope but the audacity of hope can talk like Henry Kissinger in his darkest mood? What use is liberal idealism, if not for expressing righteous indignation at American inaction during a genocide?
There was a time when liberals had the capacity to evoke some amount of shame from non-liberals when it came to foreign affairs. I wouldn’t want to overstate things and say that liberals served as America’s conscience, but they certainly appealed to it. Liberal harangues about, say, supporting various sons-of-bitches had a certain bite, even if they naïvely ignored the necessity of such support (strategic suicide cannot be morally obligatory). Nor would I wish to say that conservatives were pure cynics and disciples of realpolitik: Anti-Communism had a profound streak of moral idealism in it, and the alliances that liberal idealists opposed contributed to the ultimate defeat of the evil empire, a very great good.
But one could generalize by saying that there was a useful division of labor whereby liberals directed our collective gaze toward various evils and injustices (famines, apartheid, illiberal regimes) and it fell to conservatives to explain why America could do only so much, if anything, to remedy them. This is one of the reasons conservatism has always had a reputation for hard-heartedness. As Emerson put it, “There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” Conservatives are supposed to look for the downside, the cost; this is in the national interest. The damn hippies are supposed to dream of buying the world a Coke and the conservatives are supposed to sniff that it costs too much and there’s a moral hazard in handing out soft drinks for free.