OK, now NBC is reporting that Dennis Ross is going to go to the State Department as a "strategic adviser" on the Middle East and Persian Gulf region.  This follows weeks in which it was first rumored he would  be named as the envoy for Israel-Palestine, and then rumored he would be tabbed as the envoy to Iran.  Lots of complaints all around on both suggestions.  So now he's going to get some more backstage position in Washington.

Why all the fuss about Dennis Ross?  It's as though there is someone in this administration who thinks it is absolutely essential that he be given some kind of job, and they are now inventing a job to give him.  What I'd like to know is why Ross and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy are getting any kind of seat at all at the table at all.  These are the same cats whose bad Middle East foreign policy advice f***ed up the last administration.  And Ross is also on the advisory board of that bipatisan group of hawkish agitators, United Against a Nuclear Iran, 2009s version of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and PNAC.  The Obama administration already gave a prominent job to one member of this outfit, Richard Holbrooke.  Do the really need another?

Honestly, I think the Republic will get by just fine without Dennis Ross.