Scott Gration, the Obama administration’s envoy to Sudan, recently returned from that country to declare that the genocide was over, and that what remained were mere “remnants of genocide.” This despite the fact that Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations had just two days earlier described the situation in Darfur as an “ongoing genocide.” This disagreement generated little more than a shrug from the Washington press corps, but even the New Republic seems fed up with Gration and his “literal faith in the power of words to transcend international disagreement.”