Not All End to Evil types are full of crazy bellicosity all the time

for instance, David Frum, who actually wrote the book with the insane secular messianic title An End to Evil and who issued the great neocon Bull of Excommunication against people he declared “unpatriotic conservatives” (meaning those who dared to suggest that the Iraq War was a stupid idea and who refused to jump on Bush/Cheney/NRO’s bandwagon of War Fever), has his wits about him when he writes:

President Obama is right not to talk too much about Iran.

Words of support from an American president cannot much help the protesters – and may hurt them, by exciting nationalist feelings the regime can exploit against them.

Worse, such words stake the credibility of the United States, implying promises of support that will not be realized. Hungary 1956 is the obvious precedent, but there have been too many other cases in recent years of presidents issuing rhetorical rubber checks.

Besides: while the protests against Iran’s apparently rigged election result do look like an outpouring of democratic sentiment, the US should be properly wary of anything that might look like an endorsement of Hossein Mousavi – a dubious enough character in his own right.

Of course, this does not incline me to *trust* Frum much, since like so many other members of the disastrous End to Evil project of the Bush years, he is wandering about in the political wilderness, trying to figure out a way re-attach to the political system, distance himself from the colossal damage he helped to cause, and find new ways to push forward a great deal of the same old stuff. But even stopped clocks are right twice a day. And since I don’t believe that true words should be rejected even when spoken by dubious sources, I note his perfectly sensible observations here (including, by the way, his sensible observation that merely “not being Ahmadinejad” does not confer sainthood on Mousavi.)