Rep. Steve King (R-TXIA) isn’t just defending Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) “you lie” outburst, he’s also standing behind Wilson’s decision to vote in favor of keeping the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol. In an interview this morning on Fox News, King praised Wilson’s moral character and brushed off concerns about the racist connotations that many believe the Confederate flag imparts:

“He is an officer and a gentleman and everyone who knows him knows that…being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line. So I think Maureen Dowd is trying to whip this up and I also know she’s trying to put race into it. I didn’t know what race she was talking about when I first read her line on that.”

Watch it:

It seems that King has forgotten that for many Americans, the Confederate flag represents a lot more than the “War of Northern Agression.” In fact, the decision to fly the Confederate flag over South Carolina’s Capitol was also infused with meaning. While other Southern states took down their rebel flags, an all-white South Carolina legislature fought and won to keep theirs waving above their statehouse as the Civil Rights movement picked up steam in 1962. In 2000, Wilson was one of the seven Republicans who voted to keep it there. During the 2000 fight, one of his fellow legislators — state senator Arthur Ravenel — referred to the NAACP as “the National Association of Retarded People” and later apologized to “retarded people” for associating them with the NAACP. The Confederate flag has since been moved to the Capitol lawn.

Wilson has also been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, identified as a “source of increasingly virulent pro-Confederate, radical right propaganda.” Maureen Dowd cynically described Wilson as being part of a “loco fringe” that “clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president.”

Borzou Daragahi reports on Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri’s latest broadside against the Iranian regime, in which the country’s most prominent clerical dissident called on “senior Shiite Muslim clergy in the Iranian holy cities of Qom and Mashhad as well as the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf and beyond to speak out against the regime.”

In a statement issued today, [Montazeri] said that Iran had become a “military regime” not the Islamic government envisioned at time of the 1979 revolution.

He said it was his fellow clergymen’s “religious duty” to speak out against the the government’s abuses.

“We didn’t want a mere change in title and slogans while the same oppressions and violations of rights continue under the cover of Islamic government,” he said in the statement posted to his website.

The extent of clerical condemnation of the regime’s behavior in the wake of the June presidential elections, which have seriously undermined the government’s claims to uphold just Islamic principles, has been one of the most interesting and important aspects of the protests. Back in July, I spoke with Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who stressed how significant it was, both in religious and constitutional terms, that “leading clerics have taken sides with the Green movement.” Because of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s relatively meager scholarly credentials, Dabashi said, he “is not even in position to prevent [other clerics] from passing judgment.” “Khamenei’s official position as Supreme Leader has no bearing on his junior position as a jurist,” said Dabashi. “He’s not in a position to disallow the clerical challenge to his authority.”

A key challenge for the Obama administration as it moves forward with its Iran engagement policy is how to create the political space for Iranians to continue to contest the regime while at the same time addressing the more immediate problems of Iran’s nuclear program and support for terrorism.

Last Friday afternoon, Rush Limbaugh slammed Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for choosing not to lie about undocumented immigrants receiving health care reform benefits. While many Republicans have used Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) outburst as an opportunity to “drum up a false debate,” McCain resisted his party’s fear mongering instincts when Today Show host Matt Lauer asked him if the reforms that President Obama is proposing will cover undocumented immigrants:

MCCAIN: They do not. Everything that I’ve seen they do not, and it changes the number of uninsured in America down to about 30 million instead of the 47 or so that they talked about before. They do not as far as I can see, nor should they.

Limbaugh decided that McCain’s tepid truth-telling was completely out of line and vehemently attacked him on his show:

LIMBAUGH: McCain said that Obama wasn’t lying? This was on the Today Show today? And they asked McCain if he thought Obama was lying?…That’s why McCain lost. Really no surprise there….You know, he’s just a useful idiot. They bring him in to do exactly what he did, and that has undercut everything that the Republican opponents, conservative opponents of Obama and health care are saying. He just falls right in line with it. But this is why Senator McCain lost.

Listen:

Limbaugh should rest assured that most Republicans are still lying about Obama lying and even some Democrats have acceded to the GOP’s false claims. McCain might not be concerned about undocumented immigrants receiving free health care, but it’s unlikely that he’ll speak up against the flawed and costly citizenship verification requirements that Sens. Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Max Baucus (D-MT) are suddenly willing to adopt. Even the White House has come out saying that they’d work with Congress to make sure verification requirements are adopted and additionally indicated that undocumented immigrants should be barred from purchasing private insurance at full cost on the proposed public exchange — glazing over the fact that the private insurance market will likely shrink if health care reform passes as is. After all, it’s not like McCain dared to point out that making it more difficult for undocumented immigrants who can even afford insurance from buying it and denying coverage to those who can’t might actually be a bad idea.

Limbaugh also accused McCain of “throw[ing] Sarah Palin under the bus” when he confirmed that the President’s plan doesn’t explicitly create “death panels.”

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for further escalation in Afghanistan, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joe Liebermen (I-CT) specifically reject a previous contention made by McCain himself. The senators claim that under-resourcing the Afghanistan effort “is a recipe for quagmire and collapse of political support for the war at home”:

Mr. Obama was right when he said last year that “You don’t muddle through the central front on terror . . . You don’t muddle through stamping out the Taliban.”

Asked about Afghanistan back in Nov. 2003, McCain stressed that Iraq was the more important effort, but that he thought that we would be able to “muddle through”:

MCCAIN: I am concerned about it, but I’m not as concerned as I am about Iraq today — obviously, or I’d be talking about Afghanistan — but I believe that if Karzai can make the progress that he is making, that in the long term we may muddle through in Afghanistan.

Watch it:

None of the three hawkish senators, all of whom shilled relentlessly for the invasion of Iraq, have ever owned up to the now widely-accepted fact that the diversion of troops and resources and attention away from Afghanistan toward Iraq was the critical factor in the resurrection of the Taliban insurgency. Read more at the Wonk Room.

Pretty much any foreign policy op-ed co-written by Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman could be titled some variation of “Only Decisive Force Can Prevail in [fill in the blank].” What’s interesting about today’s item is that, in calling for further escalation in Afghanistan, the senators specifically reject a previous contention made by Sen. McCain himself.

The senators write that they “recognize that a decision to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan will be politically difficult here at home.”

Some will say we can’t afford it. Others will warn the president of “quagmire” and urge him to send either no new forces, or fewer than Gen. McChrystal recommends—perhaps with the promise of “re-evaluating” further deployments later on.

It is precisely this middle path—which the previous administration pursued for too long in Iraq—that is a recipe for quagmire and collapse of political support for the war at home. Mr. Obama was right when he said last year that “You don’t muddle through the central front on terror . . . You don’t muddle through stamping out the Taliban.”

Asked about Afghanistan back in November 2003, McCain stressed that Iraq was the more important effort, but that he thought that we would be able to, yes, “muddle through”:

MCCAIN: I am concerned about it, but I’m not as concerned as I am about Iraq today — obviously, or I’d be talking about Afghanistan — but I believe that if Karzai can make the progress that he is making, that in the long term we may muddle through in Afghanistan.

Watch it:

When I asked McCain about this at the American Enterprise Institute last February, he disputed the premise of my question, claiming: “Well, obviously you are taking that statement out of context.”

None of the three hawkish senators, all of whom shilled relentlessly for the invasion of Iraq, have ever owned up to the now widely accepted fact that the diversion of troops and resources and attention away from Afghanistan toward Iraq was the critical factor in the resurrection of the Taliban insurgency. As a Western official working in Afghanistan said to the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins, “This is the tragedy…the $70 billion that would have given you enough police and army to stabilize this place all went to Iraq.”

Noting the likelihood that the senators are simply laying the groundwork for future concern trolling, Spencer Ackerman writes “Expect a lot more of this to come from the right on Afghanistan. Rhetorical declarations of support coupled with reluctant, solemn, regretful denunciations if and when Obama doesn’t escalate exactly as they want.” Given McCain, Lieberman, and Graham’s disastrous past judgment on Afghanistan and Iraq, the president needs to be very careful about where he finds his national security allies.