"On NBC's Today show this morning, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called on President Obama to make a forceful declaration about the disputed re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"He should speak out that this is a corrupt, fraud, sham of an election," said McCain, Obama's opponent in last year's presidential election. "The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights."
"I think it's possible to engage. But item number one is giving the Iranian people a free and fair election," he said.
--John "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran" McCain [link]
Thank God we have a 47-year-old grown up as President and not the 72-year old child. President McCain would probably be ordering U.S. troops to the Iranian border right now.
DEPT. OF STOPPED CLOCKS
"When your adversary is making a fool of himself, get out of the way. That is a rule of politics Lyndon Johnson once put into the most pungent of terms. U.S. fulminations will change nothing in Tehran. But they would enable the regime to divert attention to U.S. meddling in Iran’s affairs and portray the candidate robbed in this election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, as a poodle of the Americans...
The dilemma for America is that the theocracy defines itself and grounds its claim to leadership through its unyielding resistance to the Great Satan—the United States—and to Israel. Nevertheless, Obama, with his outstretched hand, his message to Iran on its national day, his admission that the United States had a hand in the 1953 coup in Tehran, his assurances that we recognize Iran’s right to nuclear power, succeeded. He stripped the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad of their clinching argument—that America is out to destroy Iran and they are indispensable to Iran’s defense,"
--Pat Buchanan(!) [link—read the whole thing]
Being a hardcore isolationist leads to the correct conclusions on an almost annual basis—he's 100% correct here, and has 200 times the balls of any other "Republican" for saying so.
TYPICAL RIGHT-WING BLUSTER
"America today has a great opportunity to make trouble for a hostile government while at the same time potentially lending an opportunity for freedom to its oppressed people. We should use whatever resources are at our disposal to make the best of that chance."
--Dan "I should Stick to Baseball" McLaughlin [link]
Because the U.S. meddling in the elections and revolutions of other countries has such a glorious and successful track record... Getting involved in pre-revolutionary Iran and doubling down with the Shah in 1979 was arguably the greatest foreign policy blunder in history (ironically, Ahmadinejad was the revolutionary at the time) and morons like the Crank are all-too anxious to lather, rinse and repeat. Our short-term benefit (not even clear in this instance) is almost never a long-term gain for us, and even worse for the actual population involved.
FUCKING BRAIN-DEAD
Oh, and the president should wear a green tie from now on. Every day. He need say nothing more.
--Andrew Sullivan [link—and there's more "wrong" where that came from]
Daniel Larison has a terrific takedown of Sullivan's folly along with a couple other terrific posts, but now Andrew has linked to his criticism, and the resulting traffic has brought down the American Conservative website. Otherwise I'd be quoting Larison extensively. UPDATE: Larison is back up, and I will quote the piece in the comments incase it goes down again. It's too long to put up here.
