Someday, some historian will write a full history of our "alliance" with the Saudi royal family...

...and it will be one of the most shocking, and dispiriting, books ever written. We've had marriages of conveniences with monsters in our history. Particularly our alliance with Stalin in World War Two, which was understandable because Hitler was even worse, and the Red Army was doing the vast majority of the fighting. We've had alliances with various strongmen, and FDR put it pithily--he's an SBO, but he's *our* SOB. But the long, dark, twisted "alliance" with the Saudis will, I think, come more and more, as time goes by, be seen as the Platonic Ideal of our selling our souls for Mammon. Or oil. Or whatever. It will be a shadow that will never completely be lifted from us as a nation.