In yesterday’s New York Times, Helene Cooper speculates that the tide is turning on the Bush administration’s “Don’t-Talk-To-Evil” policy. Her prediction: by the first two years of the next administration, the United States will be talking to, well, everybody—North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Libya, and Venezuela. After all, she argues, the Bush administration’s recent overtures to Syria and low-level contacts with Iran regarding Iraq will likely intensify once Bush leave office, while relations with Cuba might be just a Castro heartbeat away.

But if an era of good feelings with Hugo Chavez seems just a bit far-fetched, Cooper outdoes herself, adding Hamas and Hizballah to the next administration’s buddy list. Under what circumstances might the U.S. deal with Hamas? Cooper writes:

If the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who is currently a United States darling, kisses and makes up with Hamas and somehow gets the organization to agree to recognize Israel, there’s a chance.

Apparently someone forgot to tell Cooper that approximately 250,000 Hamas supporters marched in Gaza on Saturday to mark Hamas’s 20th anniversary, with trilingual banners declaring, “We Will Not Recognize Israel.” But who needs a reality check when think-tank star power can be summoned to predict the equally outlandish future U.S.-Hizballah relationship? Relying on New America Foundation stud Daniel Levy, who has become the go-to man for all sound bites in support of engaging terrorists, Cooper writes:

[Hizballah’s] case, while hard, may not be as tough a nut as Hamas, especially if the ongoing Syrian-American détente continues. “The Americans are already talking to Nabih Berri,” says a former Israeli peace negotiator, Daniel Levy, referring to a Shiite Muslim Lebanese politician who has close ties to Hizballah and Syria.

Of course, the U.S. primarily deals with Nabih Berri because, for all the duplicity that one finds in Lebanese politics, he still isn’t an actual member of Hizballah. But raising this objection completely misses the point. After all, in soliciting advice from Levy in an article packed with fact-free analysis, Cooper mistakenly engages an unreliable “expert” long before the U.S. forges any questionable alliances. It’s thus the Times’s journalism—and not U.S. foreign policy—that is showing the most profound signs of slippage.