QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 10:14 A.M. ET:   Ferguson has distracted our attention from the collapse of the Iran nuclear talks, which were supposed to conclude yesterday with an agreement.  They concluded with...another extension, another gift of time to Iran. 

One of the vulgar aspects of this is the sugar-coating provided by the Obama administration, repeatedly assuring us that Iran is keeping its word in carrying out its responsibilities under an interim agreement to restrain its nuclear program.  In fact, even the UN says that this simply isn't true.  And the Obamans have done it before, once assuring us that Moscow has been carrying out its agreement under an arms-control treaty. 

Why do they lie?  Over and over.  The brilliant Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal very perceptively points out the way the Obama mentality works: 

Why the spin and dishonesty? Partly it’s the old Platonic conceit of the Noble Lie—public bamboozlement in the service of the greater good—that propels so much contemporary liberal policy-making (cf. Gruber, Jonathan: transparency, lack of). So long as the higher goal is a health-care bill, or arms control with Russia, or a nuclear deal with Iran, why should the low truth of facts and figures interfere with the high truth of hopes and ideals?

But this lets the administration off too easily. The real problem is cowardice. As a matter of politics it cannot acknowledge what, privately, it believes: that a nuclear Iran is undesirable but probably inevitable and hardly catastrophic. As a matter of strategy, it refuses to commit to the only realistic course of action that could accomplish the goal it professes to seek: The elimination of Iran’s nuclear capabilities by a combination of genuinely crippling sanctions and targeted military strikes.

And so—because the administration lacks the political courage of its real convictions or the martial courage of its fake ones—we are wedded to this sham process of negotiation. “They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work,” went the old joke about labor in the Soviet Union. Just so with these talks. Iranians pretend not to cheat; we pretend not to notice. All that’s left to do is stand back and wait for something to happen.

Eventually, something will happen. Perhaps Iran will simply walk away from the talks, daring this feckless administration to act. Perhaps we will discover another undeclared Iranian nuclear facility, possibly not in Iran itself. Perhaps the Israelis really will act. Perhaps the Saudis will.

All of this may suit the president’s psychological yearning to turn himself into a bystander—innocent, in his own eyes—in the Iranian nuclear crisis. But it’s also a useful reminder that, in the contest between hard-won experience and disappointed idealism, the latter always wins in the liberal mind.

COMMENT:  Very well stated.  We have an arrogant, adolescent administration, a group of people who process information like college freshmen...which some of them never ceased to be.

The problem is that they're dealing with life-and-death issues, and we won't know the extent of their failure until many lives are lost.

November 25, 2014