This Looks Like a Job for the Neocons

Painful insults abound in leaked cables

(NEWSER) - The fallout from the WikiLeaks release of US embassy cables is only just beginning, but one thing is clear: there are going to be some seriously embarrassed diplomats. Some insults to world leaders, as collected by the Telegraph:

• Nicolas Sarkozy: The French president is an "emperor with no clothes," with a “thin-skinned” and “authoritarian” manner.
• Angela Merkel: The German chancellor "avoids risks and is rarely creative."
• Moammar Gadhafi: The Libyan leader can't travel without what one diplomat described as his “voluptuous blond” Ukrainian nurse.

Best he can say is Tehran is 'isolated,' which isn't true

(NEWSER) - Charles Krauthammer continues his President Obama-is-weak crusade with an op-ed ridiculing the administration's stance on Iran. After 16 months of US "groveling" and outreach, Tehran has responded with nothing but "defiance, contempt and an acceleration of its nuclear program." The best Obama can do is repeat over and over that Iran is becoming "isolated" from the international community, Krauthammer writes in the Washington Post . More»

Nobody is afraid of the US anymore

(NEWSER) - It may look like your standard photo op, but the image of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad raising hands with the leaders of Brazil and Turkey after their deal on nukes is much, much more to Charles Krauthammer. "That picture— a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam—is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy," he writes at the Washington Post . More»

February 11 will test regime, international community

(NEWSER) - Feb. 11, the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, promises to bring tests for all parties with a hand in the nation's fate, writes Gerald Seib. Big marches traditionally herald the anniversary, and members of the opposition movement that has bloomed since last June's election will undoubtedly come out in big numbers. That's the test for Mahmoud "Ahmadinejad and his government, which will have to decide how hard to bring down their iron fist." More»

Fear of post-'60s 'moral crisis' spurred neocon's shift right

(NEWSER) - "Neoconservative" was originally a label applied to newly conservative ex-liberals and Irving Kristol, the late godfather of the movement, was among the first and finest of the kind, E. J. Dionne writes in the Washington Post. Kristol made a powerful case for "pragmatic liberalist" when he was still a moderate Democrat in the '60s, Dionne writes, before being pushed to the right by the New Left and the "counterculture’s attack on bourgeois values." More»