Mr. Trager (and the moralistic type of conservatives) criticize the Obama administration for being too soft on Egypt’s human rights record.

But Egypt is also a valuable U.S. ally, who would stand with us against Iran, and who is the recipient of billions of dollars of U.S. aid. If Obama had come down hard on Egypt for its violations of human rights, I’ll bet that national-security conservatives like Frank Gaffney would have criticized Obama for pushing around a valuable U.S. ally and potentially weakening it against foreign threats–the same charge they had made against President Carter’s criticisms of Latin American regimes when he was President.

I say that the critique of human rights has to be proportional to the offense. Egypt is no liberal democracy. But its regime cannot be remotely compared to the Janjaweed in the Sudan or to the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, just to name two. It doesn’t deserve the same criticism.

You select a country, bomb the living $hit out of it, kill 100,000 people, drive a million into refugee camps, invade and occupy.

There human rights fixed. Most dead others have a puppet government.

Curse you and your apology tour anti-military socialist fascist Euroweenie Kenyan Muslim appeasement, Barack Hussein Obama!

Hell, the Republican Party would refuse to accept binding cuts in carbon emissions, even if China signed on.

Iran is still pursuing nuclear capabilities; and Venezuela is reportedly looking to join Iran in the near-nuclear club.

In turn, many Americans are starting to fear that a key tenet of American exceptionalism – supporting pro-democratic forces against their authoritarian repressors – is being sacrificed for naught.

Did I miss this in the “American exceptionalism” book? Does this mean, for example, that we are always acting against exceptionalism when we provide military support to an authoritarian regime?

The near nuclear club? What does that mean?

Iran understood the message of our invasion of Iraq – without real nukes, rather than imaginary ones, a nation is not safe. And without all the countries within range of intermediate range missles of Iran working in concert to stop their nuclear program, nothing the US can do or say is going to influence them. I just cannot understand why this should primarily the job of the US President, rather than something for Russia and China to exert their pressure to control. Although as long as the US is willing to expend our resources to police the world, no reason those countries shouldn’t use theirs to further their control at home.