Krauthammer- I liked him a lot better when he was the host of Tales From The Crypt. Seriously when I see that guy on television he looks embalmed. That anyone would give such an brain addled individual a platform is beyond belief. But I guess that has always been their deal creating realities.

What would Krauthammer and all these other folks calling for the American govt (or Obama himself) to interfere in the domestic politics of a sovereign nation (not to mention a sovereign nation many of them have been vilifying for decades) say if other countries felt they should interfere with America's domestic politics?

These guys are gamblers. They believe that their "luck" will change based upon a single positive event. Therefore they keep trying to manufacture a positive event.

It is an addiction.

krauthammer needs to stop prescribing himself those meds -- or at least change the dosage -- something's, uh, not working there, chuckie...

There was no reason to expect Gorbachev to bring a foreign policy change for the Soviet Union; until he did.

It's a set-up.

If Mousavi wins, Krauthammer writes "Hurray, pre-emtive war and neo-con ideas win!"

If Mousavi wins and tensions with Israel reduce, Karuthammer writes the same sentence.

If Mousavi wins and still goes ahead with the nuclear program, Krauthammer writes, "Boo! Can't trust those Mohammedians. Bombs Away!"

If Ahmedinejad and Khamenei win, Krauthammer writes: "Boo! Bombing begins in 10 minutes."

It's always "Heads I win, Tails you lose with neo-cons."

"Second Arab spring"??? Since when, Krauthammer, are Persians Arab? Real pro there, Christ.

Drat. Mr or Ms Poodle beat me to it. Iranians are not Arabs. Moreover, they're Shia Muslims and thus are regarded with suspicion by the largely Sunni Muslims who populate Saudi, Egypt, Jordan, etc., etc. The likelihood of Iranian behavior being regarded by other Middle Easterners as exemplary is slim.

The neo-cons want us to attck Iran. If nuclear weapon programs won't justify it, perhaps suppressing the current demonstrations will. Whatever it takes. War, war, war.

Does the DEA know about whatever Krauthammer is taking? It seems unlikely that such powerful hallucinogens would be legal.

Krauthammer columns are best left unread

His ideas are the same as his face: fossilized.

Neocons really do think they know better when the reality is very very different.

Krauthammer - what an unfortunate, yet fitting name - for a cartoon character with his worldview.

Just one correction on some spin embedded in this: Hezbollah didn't lose the Lebanese election. That party got exactly the number of seats it was expected to win. Hezbollah's Christian allies did lose seats, probably partially as a repudiation of their alliance -- but none of it really changed the balance of power.

And yes, Krauthammer is a tendentious doofus, better left unread, along with the rest of dying WaPo.

the comments in the thread to wolfie's piece in the post is hilarious. lots of rotten fruit being thrown both at wolfie and the post.

Way to call a turd a turd, Hilzoy. Nice dissection of Krauthammer's feeble imaginings. More posts such as this one, please.

These guys are gamblers. They believe that their "luck" will change based upon a single positive event. Therefore they keep trying to manufacture a positive event.

Sounds like the banksters. "Just give us a little more TARP money to play the slots -- we know we'll hit the jackpot this time!"

You'd think that after getting Iraq so badly wrong, Krauthammer might decide to devote himself to writing op-eds on patent law or food safety...

What evidence do you have that he sees that he got Iraq so badly wrong?

lets Charles Krauthammer send us a dispatch from the alternate reality in which he lives. In that reality, apparently, Iranian demonstrators "await just a word that America is on their side."

You made my point yourself. In his reality he's been right about everything and "we" have been and still are wrong about everything. Simply because it's not possible for him to be wrong, since his ideas are right and ours are whacky. End of story.

Why do we keep expecting it to be any way other than this? We are dealing with the insane and they only talk to people who are equally insane. They validate each other's insane reality. And so it is.

Someone should tel Krauthammer that Iranians are not Arabs

Krauthammer has got to be the worst poker player ever. All he ever does is up the ante. This is a time when you gotta hold 'em. For all we know, Mousavi could be worse than Amadickinajar. (Jon Stewart may have coined that last night. If not, then I want it.)

Ten years ago it was possible take the WaPo stable of pundits seriously. Will, Samuelson, Broder, even Krauthammer. OK, maybe not Krauthammer..

But now? These folks served as cheerleader for the Great Iraq Fiasco and stood by as the radical right led the country into the Great Recession.

What this country needs more than anything is new, competent, opinion leaders. The WaPo STILL publishes this group of losers? Help me.

Now, with Hezbollah having lost elections in Lebanon and with Iraq establishing the institutions of a young democracy, the fall of the Islamist dictatorship in Iran would have an electric and contagious effect. The exception -- Iraq and Lebanon -- becomes the rule. Democracy becomes the wave. Syria becomes isolated; Hezbollah and Hamas, patronless. The entire trajectory of the region is reversed."

Krauthammer is so full of shit, it's no wonder his eyes are brown.

Hezbollah did not "lose" the election in Lebanon, unless getting 57% of the popular vote doesn't matter (1% more than last time BTW). They got ONE LESS SEAT THAN THEY HAD only because of the "weighting" of votes for guaranteed seats.

Whatever "young democracy" exists in Iraq, only Krauthammer and his fellow cabal-members in the NeoCon Kabbalah would be able to recognize.

The Washington Pest - not the paper it was 36 years ago. Were Fred Hiatt and his crew of drooling illiterates - whose existence is an insult to journalism - to have been running the paper in 1974, Nixon would be President In Perpetuity.

The Washington Post has really become THE newspaper for the so-called "neocons".

Certainly more so than any other major "mainstream" newspaper.

And even more so than some of the openly partisan Republican so-called "conservative" media.

In the end the "neo-cons" simply speak for the military-industrial-petroleum complex.

Their agenda is really nothing more or less than to spend massive amounts of taxpayer money on the military armaments corporations, and a vastly expanded US military, which will then be deployed as the private mercenary army of the giant oil corporations to secure control of the world's last, biggest, best reserves of high-quality, cheaply extractable oil.

Which means the Middle East (a.k.a. "The Prize", in Dick Cheney's words).

This is what they call "spreading democracy", which is a "neocon" phrase meaning "to enrich the military-industrial complex and the giant oil corporations".

And the Washington Post has chosen to be their newspaper.

It's no coincidence that the Post has simultaneously been running these "neocon" columns at the same time they are running op-ed columns full of global warming denialist pseudoscience and dishonest attacks on the renewable energy industry.

Let's not forget the word Eisenhower sent the Iranians in 1953, when he toppled their democratically elected government and installed the Shah. The same Shah against whose abuses helped give rise to the ascension of Khomeini 25 or so years later.

A wondrous scenario:

Kidnap Krauthammer. Blindfold him and put him in a cab. Drive the cab into the belly of a transport plane, fly him to Iran, and then drive the cab right up to the front door of the Iranian Ministry of Justice. Take the blindfold off and kick Krauthammer out onto the sidewalk, wrapped in some shiny wrapping paper (Halloween devils are nice) with a sign pinned to his back, reading "Death to Ahmadi."

Darwin,

"Someone should tel Krauthammer that Iranians are not Arabs"

Good luck.

The American RightWing STILL has yet to grasp that less than 25% of Muslims are Arab.

All Mousavi can do with foreign policy is not deny the holocaust and not be as much a barking mad dolt as Ahme-whatshisname. The President of Iran is NOT in control of the military - the Ayatollah is. The President is not in charge of foreign affairs - the Ayatollah is.

The Iranian President is in charge of the domestic economy, ministries, and the like as per the overall policies of the Ayatollah. The Iranian President is the face of Iran in foreign visits.

A new, better Iranian President can help change the tone but not the overall direction of Iran.

@steve:
The neo-cons want us to attck Iran. If nuclear weapon programs won't justify it, perhaps suppressing the current demonstrations will. Whatever it takes. War, war, war.

And what ELSE is there to jump-start a false new economy? The two we have going (and failing) aren't doing the trick. We need a newer, bigger war to get the engines of the economy going!

I hope the goddamned Washington Post goes out of business. Keeping the drooler Krauthammer (not to mention Will and Broder, speaking of droolers) around while getting rid of Froomkin is a joke.

And what is the Post's agenda? Well, which country in the Mideast do Krauthammer and Wolfowitz (who wrote a companion piece today) favor over all others, unfortunately including the U.S.?

Krauthammer is one Krazy Kook, isn't he.

Isn't it clear that ...

When the gov't uses violence against peaceful people we will stand (at least in spirit) with the Peaceful people.

When the people riot and do violence we would not oppose the gov't using force to bring about Domestic Tranquility.

When the people request or demand a recount and to have their challenges to the election investigated we stand with them and Democracy.

We stand (and will help others who will stand with us) for Peace, Prosperity, Freedom, Democracy and all the other ideals America has always stood for (even when we had trouble living up to it).

The extent to which we can act on our support may vary according to circumstances.

I've heard a legend that Krauthammer was once respected. I find it hard to credit.

Before it's over, these idiot neocons will get us all killed.

Hey, remember how after the US lost the Vietnam War, communism somehow failed to spread to neighboring countries like Thailand, Indonesia, or India? That's because the domino theory doesn't work, which is why pretty much everyone with a reasonable grasp on reality stopped advocating it back in the 80s. It didn't work against us, and it's not going to suddenly turn around and work for us.

One big reason the domino theory failed is it assumed communist nations all share the same hivemind, the same goals, and the same greater identity. If this had been true, though, Vietnam wouldn't have fought a war against communist Cambodia and communist China with the aid of the USSR. To believe Iran is going to trigger a wave of democracy through the entire Middle East, you'd need to think that Iran is Arab and not mostly Persian, not to mention about a dozen other things a 12-year-old with an atlas could easily disprove.

In the region, it would launch a second Arab spring. The first in 2005 -- the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon, the first elections in Iraq and early liberalization in the Gulf states and Egypt...

Ah, there you go. By the way, Egypt isn't Arab either. They're Egyptians.

When I was called all kinds of names and unpatriotic and anti-American because I didn't support or believe in the Iraq war, after all the tacky remarks, I always asked: "If you believe in this war so much, when are you enlisting?" I got more excuses than you'll ever hear from students that didn't do their homework. Republicans and their supporters want war, war, war, but they all want someone else's children to fight it.

It's fairly naive to think that if the regime goes the only thing that will change will be that now Mousavi will be president.

When change comes like it may in Iran a lot will change in a fairly short period of time.

The real irony is that Krauthammer was a psychiatrist before he became a political commentator, which supports the old canard that the most insane people of all are couch doctors.

Dr. Strangelove = Dr. Krauthammer

Richard Armitage: "...Well, I, I think, in the first place, either of those two gentlemen having been elected would not grandly affect the United States. Mr. [garbled] Mousavi seems to be pretty benign, nice guy, but here's a fellow who in his earlier years, very involved in not only the, the revolution in Iran, but the, uh, taking over of our embassy, and very involved in getting birth, giving birth to Hezbollah. So, the relative benign nature of Mousavi vice, versus Ahmadinejad is, is something that I really question. I think they, it, it's just a matter of degrees. Second, I , I don't think there will be any dramatic changes in U.S. Iran relationships. We will, as Mr. Obama said, reach out the hand of friendship. That's a good thing. They'll have to make a decision whether to take it or not. I'm not totally hopeless that we can dissuade them from their program. Make sure that they do have nuclear power, but that they don't, uh, misdirect it toward nuclear weapons. And I think this is gonna be something that proceeds almost a snail's pace, no matter who is elected..."

http://blog.showmeprogress.com/diary/3043/richard-armitage-at-missouri-boys-state-q-and-a-part-1

I also noticed that the Post had a column by Paul Wolfowitz, another savant who led us down a very slippery slope. I realize that we live in a society that embraces a free exchange of ideas. Why can't we all - including the MSM - ignore these discredited hacks and let them live out their lives in the anonymity they so richly deserve?

Perhaps Mr. Krauthammer would like us to invade. I am sure that the Iranians would welcome us with flowers.

And to think Krautguy once listened to the inner feelings of people lying on his couch. How well are they, now?

All could be ever so peaceful if the council of imans simply signed all oil and natural gas rights over to Cheney and Halliburton. In the movie "W", the scariest part was looking at Cheney's map showing American Flags on Iranian soil.

The USA also gave it's word (and promise of CIA support) to the Indonesian outer islands' revolt in the late 1950s, then sat back and did nothing and watched them get betaen by the Indonesian government.

Suppose, just for a second, that America did give the Iranian protesters "the word", and somehow democracy did "bust out all over". Iran became indistinguishable from Twenty-Nine Palms, except there were more Persians and fewer McDonalds.

Who would be the enemy then?

The Right has to have a constant looming threat to life, liberty and The American Way in order to market its product, which is fear and hatred, and which loosens pursestrings when liberally applied. If Americans were not always afraid of some bogeyman, they might focus on things like domestic reform, quality of life and making America competitive in fields other than invasion.

Republicans are that kid on the playground who always said, "Whoa! are you gonna let him talk to you like that?", always trying to get a fight going. And Iran has been distilled into the bully everyone is supposed to fear.