"Empathy suffers from jet-lag -- it often wakes up only after it's no longer possible to do anything to help," said my father, a man who lost many relatives to the holocaust.

Since their days as medical school classmates, Bashar al-Assad and Zaher Sahloul have followed rather different paths: one became a war criminal; the other, a humanitarian advocate.

In an election year that finds both the left and right clamoring for political change, then, it seems suicidal for the Democrats to be putting forward a candidate who is as much a creature of the establishment as Hillary Rodham Clinton is.