Leslie Gelb and Richard Cohen are in bed with the wingnuts

Justin Elliott at Salon has a great post talking about Mubarak’s American fan club. There are all the usual wingnuts like John Bolton and Pamela Geller and Rush Limbaugh, but guess who else?! Richard Cohen of the Washington Post and Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, formerly of the New York Times, both cheerleaders to a dictator. This is a wonderful public pillory; it will help to demolish Gelb and Cohen’s credibility on any other foreign-policy subject. And I believe if they were halfway honest about it that in both men’s cases, the motivation is no different from Geller, a former liberal as I remember who went wild right because of Israel. Or for that matter Norman Podhoretz, Marty Peretz, and the late Irving Kristol– all former liberals who went right because of fears for Israel’s security. Watch Gelb and Cohen try to walk it back in days to come as their island gets lonelier.