Let’s get morally equivalent. What attracts outrage? Nancy Pelosi meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2007. You’ll recall that a chorus of right-wing discontent, all the way up to George W. Bush, greeted Pelosi’s 2007 trip. Some said Pelosi had actually broken the law. Among her critics was Joe Lieberman, who called the trip a "mistake" because of Syria’s amorphous role in America’s undifferentiated war against The Moslem. 

Yet Lieberman sees nothing wrong with posing for a photo with Avigdor Lieberman, the racist attempting to become Israel’s next foreign minister. This, of course, is a delicate time in Israel, as Benjamin Netanyahu is cobbling together a government. One way Netanyahu could go would be to persuade the centrist-right Kadima Party and the left-ish Labor Party to join him in a coalition. Among the rationales for such an attempt is that a government that includes Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party would be an international pariah, since Lieberman stands for such noxious things as demanding loyalty oaths for Arab citizens of Israel. If supporters of Israel don’t like international condemnation, imagine what a swell time we’ll have with an unambiguous bigot as chief Israeli diplomat. 

And yet here’s Joe Lieberman, posing with the man, an act that, whatever Lieberman’s intent, sends the message America can live with extremists like Avigdor Lieberman in the corridors of Israeli power. Matthew Yglesias remarks, "Why on earth would a U.S. politician intervene to nudge [Israeli coalition-forming] in a less centrist direction?" I can hardly know what’s in Joe Lieberman’s heart, and I don’t really want to waste my time calling his office for a rote explanation. But suffice it to say that when Lieberman emerges next to criticize President Obama’s foreign policy judgment — implicitly asserting the superiority of his own — it’ll be worth remembering that at a time of testing for Israel, he embraced a racist.