“He should point out this is not just an Iranian issue. This is an American issue.” This is John McCain, from the Rachel Maddow clip below. To me, this encapsulates the entire problem with the Right’s approach to foreign policy.

On the clip Chris Hayes of The Nation said,

“In the long mythology of neoconservatism there’s a notion that Reagan single-handedly brought down the entire Soviet Empire because he said ‘tear down this wall,’ and somehow if you are, like, really willful and chest thumping that the world will sort of bend to your will. … There’s a tremendous pathological narcissism on behalf of people like McCain and [Lindsey] Graham, that everything revolves around the U.S. and revolves around our own, kind of, preening moral self-satisfaction, and it’s actually, it’s really destructive. I mean, if the president were doing what they wanted him to do, we would see things get worse in Iran, worse for the dissidents and protesters. It’s very hard to excuse.”

Of course, in a sense what’s going on in Iran is not just an Iranian issue; it’s the world’s issue. On the other hand, this is very much an issue the Iranian people need to work out for themselves, without outside interference.

And all manner of people keep saying that bellicose rhetoric from America is exactly what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei want, just as an American invasion of a Muslim country was exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted. The chuckleheads on the American Right are so easily manipulated it isn’t funny.

Today there is much self-righteous chest-thumping on the Right about bloodshed in the streets of Tehran. The chest-thumpers are, for the most part, the same crew who has been calling for bombing of Iran for years. They wail about the martyred Neda Agha-Soltan, but if Ms. Agha-Soltan had been killed by an American bomb or drone she would have been, to them, collateral damage and not given a moment’s thought.

A rightie reading this might accuse me of “blaming” America. No, I’m saying America needs to not do things that are blameworthy. It’s my country, right or wrong, but as a patriot I feel it’s my duty to nudge it toward the right and away from the wrong.