Hugh Hewitt: While we debate health reform, the Iran crisis deepens

By Hugh Hewitt

With thousands of Tea Party protesters swarming the National Mall on Saturday, the continuing debate over the president's throwdown on Wednesday night ("We will call you out!") and Joe Wilson's decorum-breaching callout of the president, it is no wonder that few Americans are paying attention to fast-moving events abroad.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu jets off to meet with Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, rejects stiff sanctions on Iran.

Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatens to crush dissidents at Friday prayers in Tehran, and in the same address rejects curbs on Iran's nuclear program.

And the American State Department won't take no for an answer from Iran, which agreed to talks on a wide range of subjects except its nuclear program.

"We'll be looking to see if they are willing to engage seriously on these issues," State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said on the same day Iran's top mullah said Iran wouldn't engage seriously on the issue.

"If we have talks, we will plan to bring up the nuclear issue," Crowley continued.

This is "through-the-looking-glass" stuff, as the Obama administration resurrects appeasement as a diplomatic tool. There is apparently nothing that the fanatics running Iran can do that will cause President Obama's team to speak candidly about the nature of the regime and its intractability.

Whether Netanyahu went to warn Putin of a coming confrontation with Iran that Russia would be well advised to stay out of, or whether it was just a social visit, we cannot know.

Nor can we know what happened to the hijacked MV Arctic Sea and its mysterious cargo.

All a curious observer can conclude is that events are accelerating around Iran's nuclear ambition and that the mullahs, unnerved by the vast unrest roiling beneath them, are rushing forward to permanently change the game by weaponizing their enriched uranium.

Did I mention that gold is now above $1,000 an ounce?

Of course, the health care debate is vitally important to the future of the country, and the threat to the health care of seniors is particularly acute. The left wing of the congressional Democrats and the most left-wing president in American history have their eyes firmly fixed on a massive expansion of government that is tantalizingly close.

The marchers on Washington -- like the folks at TeaPartyProtests.org across the country and every participant in August town hall meetings -- all know that domestic politics have entered an intense phase triggered by deep policy differences between those who view the massive growth of the federal government with alarm, and those who see it as a party-building exercise.

The political pros on both sides of the aisle are already handicapping the elections of November 2010 and making comparisons with the mood of September 1993.

The difference, of course, was that 1993's health care debate did not take place in the context of a world rushing toward a very dangerous confrontation with a regime that may well be the globe's first suicide nation. Or with America's military engaged on two fronts in an ongoing war with radical Islam.

The president's seemingly endless series of speeches on his radical plans for a makeover of American medicine are all basically the same speech with revolving backdrops. We all know the talking points by now, and very few minds are left to be persuaded, only counting the votes of the Blue Dog Democrats who are willing to go over the cliff for the president next fall.

Given that so much of the health care argument is now over, perhaps the president could be asked by the press corps what he intends to do when Israel acts to stop Iran.