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Saturday, Jun 12, 2010 2:13 PM UTC

John McCain on the Evil, Barbaric Iranians

Writing in the New Republic, the Arizona Senator provides a classic case of nationalistic blindness

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Topics: John McCain, R-Ariz., Washington, D.C.,

John McCain has a new article in The New Republic — which is exactly where it should be — calling for regime change in Iran.  The whole article contains one paragraph after the next of the favorite pastime of America’s political and media class:  self-righteously condemning other nations for what we ourselves do (at least) as much.  Of all McCain’s paragraphs, this is probably my favorite (h/t sandbun):

Is it any wonder that this is the same regime that spends its people’s precious resources not on roads, or schools, or hospitals, or jobs that benefit all Iranians — but on funding violent groups of foreign extremists who murder the innocent?

As the American war in Afghanistan enters its ninth full year and our occupation of Iraq its seventh, and as we continue to find all new ways to kill innocent civilians in various countries around the world, and as we continue to transfer billions of dollars every year to Israel and the Egyptian dictatorship — all while thinking about how to slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and thus erode the weak safety net even further, while confronting collapsing domestic infrastructure, rampant unemployment, and massive teacher lay-offs and even grade elimination for American children — is there any other country you can think of, besides Iran, which “spends its people’s precious resources not on roads, or schools, or hospitals, or jobs that benefit all [citizens]” but rather on wars and support for foreign groups which kill “the innocent”?  And over the last decade, what was the position of John McCain and his party on whether the “people’s precious resources” should be spent (a) on “roads, or schools, or hospitals, or jobs that benefit all” (see here) or (b) wars that kill the innocent?

And then there’s this:

We — the government and the people of the United States — need to stand up for the Iranian people. We need to make their goals our goals, their interests our interests, their work our work.

Oh, yes — John McCain is so deeply concerned about the welfare of The Iranian People.  He just adores them.  That’s why his Siamese twin, Joe Lieberman, advocates that we bomb their country, while McCain merrilly sings songs about doing so.  The best way to show how noble and profoundly caring you are about other people is to bomb their country; they love that and it’s really, really good for them.  One other thing about the Iranians that McCain wants to note:

And is it any wonder that this Iranian regime has been, and will always be, uncompromising in its pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability . . . .

Those murderous monsters!  What kind of evil fanatics would want a nuclear weapons capability?  In the interview I just did with The Atlantic, I was asked:  ”If you could correct one mis-impression among Americans that is exacerbated by media, what would it be?”  I replied:  ”our media’s refusal to report that we ourselves frequently do exactly that which we like to believe only the Bad, Tyrannical countries do.”  Thank you to John McCain — and his like-minded friends at The New Republic — for providing such a classic illustration. 

Glenn Greenwald

Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald. More Glenn Greenwald.

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