“SMART DIPLOMACY” UPDATE: John F. Kerry’s Israeli gaffe a diplomatic nightmare. I think they gave him this job so Hillary’s tenure would look good by comparison, but for the first time in his life he’s over-performing.

UPDATE: Kerry Echoes His Boss. “John Kerry is attempting to walk back his smear of Israel as an “apartheid” state. That the current secretary of state is a clownish figure has been well known for decades. But what should not be lost in the latest gaffe is that it is not a gaffe. In what he foolishly thought was a safe place to let his hair down, Kerry merely gave voice to what the Obama administration thinks. . . . Forget Kerry. This was made explicit in Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—for anyone who didn’t infer it already from Obama’s friendships with notorious Israel bashers like Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers (see P. David Hornik’s FPM report on Ayers joining his fellow tenured radicals in a 2010 petition accusing Israel of — all together now — apartheid policies).”

Related: John Kerry’s Jewish Best Friends.