Oops, she did it again. Six weeks after she called Syrian butcher Bashar Assad a "reformer," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has goofed a second time.
Although she accuses Assad's government of "unlawful detention, torture, and the denial of medical care to wounded persons," her prescription doesn't even amount to tough love. She sounds like she just wants to put him on the couch.
Playing amateur shrink, Clinton lapsed into psychobabble in one interview, saying, "What we have tried to do with him is to give him an alternative vision of himself and Syria's future."
Clinton's mush is more than a mere embarrassment. Assad will take it as a green light to keep on killing, even as the body count is said to approach 1,000. Tens of thousands of men and boys are being rounded up, whole towns are locked down by the military and others are being shelled.
With each passing day, it gets harder to justify the NATO war against Libya's Muammar Qaddafi for his threat to slaughter his citizens while Assad is treated with kid gloves.
Given their failure to at least speak forcefully against his brutal regime, Clinton and her boss, President Obama, are the ones in need of a new vision -- one where America stands every time with innocent people dying to be free.
If they can't do that, they should at least be quiet, lest they make fools of themselves again and contribute to the slaughter of more Syrians.
Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist. To continue reading this column on other topics, including big oil and the U.S. Senate, click here.
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