Joe Klein completely *said* it.

Swampland.

The Washington Post has a piece today about the efforts of some Republicans to make hay out of the situation in Iran. McCain, who spent the entire 2008 election making misleading statements about the nature of the Iranian government (I wonder if he still thinks Ahmadinejad is more powerful than the Supreme Leader), has been at the forefront of this. It is very unseemly. I have yet to hear what possible good it would do for the President of the United States to encourage the protesters, except to give the Iranian regime a better excuse for killing more of them. McCain's bleatings are either for domestic political consumption or self-satisfaction, a form of hip-shooting onanism that demonstrates why he would have been a foreign policy disaster had he been elected.

To put it as simply as possible, McCain--and his cohorts--are trying to score political points against the President in the midst of an international crisis. It is the sort of behavior that Republicans routinely call "unpatriotic" when Democrats are doing it. I would never question John McCain's patriotism, no matter how misguided his sense of the country's best interests sometimes seems. His behavior has nothing to do with love of country; it has everything to do with love of self.

I am in love with the phrase "hip-shooting onanism." I like the way he expressed what McCain seems to be doing, but I think McCain is just one of the more egregious examples. This goes for pundits like Charles Krauthammer, and other pols like Dana Rohrbacher and Lindsey Graham, too. This idea that, somehow, stronger rhetoric from the "Great Satan" is exactly what the protesters need and will help and stuff is....a neo-con circle-jerk. It might be cool to say something has to be done, all macho-like, but it's really another thing entirely to do the right thing, which sometimes doesn't involve being tough, or even doing anything at all. These protests are about Iranian democracy.

Democracy kind of needs to be a popular movement, don't you think? Iran's drama is not about *us*. (But you know some people just need to make it about them.)