First, the Slap in the Face, Then the Kick in the Pants

It’s disturbing how quickly civility can turn into hatefulness in the world’s oldest democracy, the United States of America. Secretly inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress was in itself an insult. With his usual apocalyptic rhetoric — invoking everything from the Amalekites down to the Nazis — the Israeli prime minister dug up everything he could to criticize Obama’s Iran policy. Just imagine what the reaction would have been if a Democratic Congress had invited Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to deliver a rant to Congress attacking Guantanamo and George W. Bush’s plans to invade Iraq in 2002, shortly before the congressional elections. Republicans would have screamed bloody murder. Now they’ve gone and broken another diplomatic taboo: In an open letter to the government of Iran, 47 Republican senators told Tehran that any agreements Obama might make regarding Iran’s nuclear program could be nullified by the next U.S. government.

Foreign policy in the United States is the province of the president. Members of Congress who seek to insert themselves between Obama and his foreign policies damage the office of the president. First, they slap his face, and now, they kick him in the pants. It doesn’t get any shabbier than that.