There is literally nothing you can do to lose the respect of the villagers. And a new generation carries on the tradition.

credit: MSNBC

How sadly predictable it was to see yet another Republican hawk with a very long history, the old foreign policy hand John Negroponte, appearing on MSNBC’s Ronan Farrow show Friday where he testified to the integrity of America’s spies and wrung his hands ineffectually over the child refugee crisis at the border. After all, the man is a virtual Zelig, having been an integral part of every foreign policy disaster for the past 30 years. Unfortunately, none of that came up. After allowing Negroponte to offer up a spirited defense of the intelligence community in which he declared that all of this unpleasantness should be hashed out in secret rather than in the public eye, Farrow sagely agreed that his own vast experience in the government proved the employees of the national security establishment to all be of the very highest caliber. At that point he asked Negroponte to share his insights about the border situation given his expertise on Central America as a former ambassador in the region. If Negroponte had been in the hands of a more skilled and knowlegeable interlocutor, we might have had an interesting exchange at that point.

Unfortunately that was not to be.