Observations during the coldest week of the winter (we hope) in your nation’s capital:

“It used to be said that politics ended at the water’s edge. What that generally meant was that presidents weren’t criticized while overseas and the harshest self-criticism came in at-home debates, too.

No more.

John Kerry provided the latest example of how that axiom is no longer operative. The 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, appearing at an economic summit in Davos, Switzlerland, in late January, called the United States a “sort of international pariah.”

The Massachusetts senator, who recently announced he would not run for president in ‘08, was pictured with ex-Iranian President Mohammad Khatami.

“When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don’t advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy,” Kerry said.

“Jane Fonda is back and probably hurting the cause she rejoined after a 34-year public hiatus. She showed up at a Washington anti-war protest last weekend, reprising her anti-Vietnam War past. Fonda may be the only more polarizing figure than President Bush. Conservative bloggers and talk-show hosts dusted off “Hanoi Jane” references. That old black-and-white photo of Fonda sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery came back into circulation. Those images will do more to stir her old enemies than she could ever do to inspire any new generation of anti-war protesters.

“Even as we debate the lessons of bad or twisted intelligence that preceded the war in Iraq, the Bush administration is putting out new intelligence reports claiming that Iran is funding and agitating sectarian violence in Iraq on top of its overall atomic (i.e. weapons of mass destruction) ambitions.

Some fear that the administration is preparing the ground for war with Iran with a rationale as suspect as that used to invade Iraq: that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, had nuclear ambitions and had demonstrated a hatred for the United States.

Ex-Secretary of State Madeline Albright told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that she is “skeptical” of what George W. Bush says about Iran “because of the decision failures leading to the war in Iraq.”

There may be “bad things” going on in Iran, Albright said, but “the truth is that when there are so many doubts about how we got into the war (in) Iraq and what the basic circumstances were, then unfortunately the president has put himself and the administration into a position where people are skeptical.”

For the record, the Clinton administration believed Saddam Hussein had WMD and ambitions for more WMD throughout the sanctions-and-bombing phase of the 1990s. In June 1999, the Clinton administration accused Russia, Iraq and North Korea of stockpiling smallpox. In February 2000, then Secretary-of-State Albright told the House International Relations Committee that “we remain focused on containing the threat posed by the Iraqi regime’s aggression and WMD capabilities.”