The Australian
Cut & Paste
The BBC on July 14:
US conservatives have lined up to condemn the deal reached between major world powers and Iran.
Politico on Tuesday:
Influential Republicans and a handful of Democrats howled in protest Monday over Obama’s decision to seek the United Nations’ blessing for the Iran nuclear deal before congress has had a chance to weigh in.
Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post last Thursday:
When you write a column, as did I two weeks ago, headlined “The worst agreement in US diplomatic history”, you don’t expect to revisit the issue. We had hit bottom. Or so I thought. Then on Tuesday the final terms of the Iranian nuclear deal were published. I was wrong.
Deja vu. Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985:
I bet the hardliners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands.
Krauthammer in The Washington Post on December 3, 1987:
Americans are getting dizzy over Gorbachev.
George Will in Newsweek:
Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.
The American Spectator editor-in-chief R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr on November 23, 1986:
Blinded by a good impulse, (Reagan) has behaved arrogantly, deviously and as the classic appeaser … The greater irony is that it should be the religious paradise of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that corrupted the foreign policy behaviour of this conservative president.
The New York Times on December 6, 1987:
The leaders of the far Right responded by forming … the Anti-Appeasement Alliance. Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus said: “Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan is a very weak man with a very strong wife and a strong staff. He has become a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda.”
The Daily Beast in October 2010, looking back on 1987’s Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty:
The conservative stalwart National Review dedicated an entire issue to the INF Treaty, calling it “Reagan’s Suicide Pact” … Henry Kissinger warned that the treaty undid “40 years of NATO” … Bob Dole, the Republican leader in the Senate, who was undecided on the treaty, put it bluntly: “I don’t trust Gorbachev.”
When Richard Nixon went to China. The US Studies Centre’s
William F. Buckley Jr — National Review editor and patron saint of American conservatives — complained that the US had “lost, irretrievably, any remaining sense of moral mission in the world”. Leading conservative and NR publisher William Rusher called the betrayal of Taiwan “one of the greatest double crosses of all time”. William Loeb, publisher of New Hampshire’s Union Leader, warned that Nixon’s ideological odyssey was “immoral, indecent, insane and fraught with danger for the survival of the United States”. Reverend Carl McIntire … charged that Nixon had “abandoned all moral principles: it is like God and the devil having a high-level meeting” … And actor John Wayne deplored the president’s week-long China trip as “a real shocker”.
This article was originally published in The Australian
