Have you noticed that with every passing, depressing day, with each new demoralizing revelation of Obamic foreign-policy malpractice, our secretary of state comes more and more to resemble the “telescopic philanthropist” of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Mrs. Jellyby? Yes, the modern version’s a spiffed-up pants-suit-sporting didactician with her eye on the main chance, while the original’s a sloven, a “diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . they could see nothing nearer than Africa!” But Mrs. Jellyby’s eternal devotion to the health, education, and welfare of “the natives of Borrioboola-Gha,” to the exclusion of a moment’s care for her own very real, very cold, very filthy, very starved brood of children, and Mrs. Clinton’s implacable fidelity to the “diplomatic process,” to the exclusion of any apparent thought for the very real brutal truths of the world in which we actually live, have a beautiful symmetry. “The African project at present employs my whole time,” says Mrs J.
“We have no illusions about the Iranian government,” says Mrs. C. “The point is to meet and explain to the Iranians, face to face, the choices that Iran has, and to see whether Iran is prepared to engage.” And:
The words are different. The music’s exactly the same.
