Jonah Goldberg calls out President Obama and the Left today in the L.A. Times:

During the Bush years, what was best about liberalism had bled away. One of the worst things about the Republican Party has always been its Kissingerian realpolitik, the “it’s just business” approach to world affairs that amounted to a willful blindness to our ideals beyond our own borders. The Democratic Party may not have always gotten the policies right, but it had a firm grasp of the principle.

In the 1990s, liberals championed “nation building,” and conservatives chuckled at the naivete of it. Then came Iraq, and Republicans out of necessity embraced what liberals once believed out of conviction. The result? Liberals ran from their principles, found their inner Kissingers and embraced a cold realism whose chill emanated from the corpse of their ideals.

Labor unions, such as the AFL-CIO, once battled tyranny abroad on the grounds that workers everywhere need democracy. Today, the president turns a blind eye to the independent labor movement in Iran, and the unions and Democrats spend their time trying to figure out how to eliminate the secret ballot in the American workplace.

Read it. And also read Dr. Melissa Clouthier’s take:

Words matter. President Obama knows this. He uses words like others wield swords. Mostly, he uses them to benefit himself. It’s time for him to use words to benefit the oppressed people of the world. Iran is a nice start.

There’s a good link round-up in her post, too.