Could’ve fooled us. After weeks of White House leaks and plots to counter the impact of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress tomorrow, Secretary of State John Kerry tells ABC’s This Week that, er … everything’s cool, man. Even ABC’s not quite buying this, given what Susan Rice said just one week earlier:

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“The prime minister of Israel is welcome to speak in the United States, obviously,” Kerry said today in an exclusive interview on ABC’s “This Week.” “I talk to the prime minister regularly, including yesterday.”

But, Kerry added, “we don’t want to see this turned into some great political football.”

Kerry echoed frustrations expressed by the White House that House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu was inappropriate.

“It was odd, if not unique, that we learned of it from the speaker of the House and that an administration was not included in this process,” he said. “But the administration is not seeking to politicize this.”

But Kerry’s remarks were far more measured than those of National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who said last week that the speech would be “destructive to the fabric of the relationship.”

How did we get from destroying the very fabric of the relationship between Israel and the US to hey, let’s not worry about this speech from our good buddy Bibi? Simple: the White House realized that they were losing the public-relations battle. Going after John Boehner for not asking permission (even though Boehner didn’t need it or need to ask for it, because Congress is separate and co-equal with the executive) plays well among the media cognoscenti. Attacking a head of government from a closely-allied nation for paying a visit doesn’t sell well at all, not even among Barack Obama’s own party. Hence we have Kerry doing his best Matthew McConaughey imitation: all right, all right, all right.

On ISIS, Kerry claims that the US-led coalition is “routing” the marauding army everywhere they engage it in Iraq … but that seems to be as based in reality as the plan to liberate Mosul in April. Martha Raddatz emphasizes the assessment that ISIS may be the worst barbarian horde since Genghis Khan, perhaps an oblique reference to Kerry’s description of the American army in Vietnam, and quotes Obama administration officials that say the opposite of ISIS. Kerry responds that the administration is “super focused” on terrorism. After having their policies lead to two failed states in the last four years that have given room for open terror operations (Libya and Iraq), one would hope that they would be at a minimum.