Post-revolution, the interval between useful idiot and useless idiot disappears, and the rose-strewn streets, so lately sites of delirious parades and energetic visionaries, become littered with riddled remains of the expendable.

I'm trying hard to hold onto my belief in hope and change. I think Obama and his people are very smart, and they attract other smart, talented - visionary - people. And we need them and we need that process to rescue this country. We have wars busting out all over, in addition to our own grinding atrocities in the Middle East and South Asia.

The trashed economy is staring us in the face. Our entire, global monetary system, for the past several years, has rested on a bubble, a giant puffball of speculation-driven super-trading that, in reality, had no value at all; like a fresh street whore, it was sought after only for a moment, and after each commission player chipped out his percentage and sent it a step higher up the paper trail, its actual bearing atomized.

Everyone is waiting for the next shoe to fall; everyone is expecting more bad news.

The one bright spot in all this was the impending Obama presidency, where business-as-usual was, like torture, lying and month-long vacations, disavowed.

That's why the news of Dennis Ross named as a likely special envoy to Iran comes as such a disappointment. I feel like a true believer betrayed - swept up in the night and dumped in the gutter with a bullet in my neck.

Dennis Ross! If ever there was a liberal-camp neocon, it's him. As Jim Lobe notes in his blog:

Needless to say, if the memo is genuine (and I have no doubt that it is) and accurate, Ross' appointment marks a major setback for those who had hoped that Obama might bring some fresh thinking to Middle East policy, particularly vis-a-vis Iran and Israel-Palestine.

Great. Don't dare start believing too much, lest ye be gob-smacked. There was something about Obama's silence on the Gaza incursion I took as defiance to the Israeli Lobby: He didn't go running to a live mike and swear fealty forever to our brave - and violent - li'l ally in the Levant. Now, that doesn't look like the indication, at all. Maybe... maybe his reticence just means he has nothing new to say. 

I guess that was too much to hope for. A review of Ross' checkered resume is valuable, on RightWeb:

Ross's role in the Clinton administration was later assessed by the international relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their controversial 2006 paper for Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Mearsheimer and Walt wrote, "During the Clinton Administration ... Middle East policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organizations--including Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits there. These men were among President Clinton's closest advisors at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favored creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel.

And Martin Indyk, Hillary...Richard Holbrooke. What next?