Wait a minute: Do 8 months of self-mortification and public pleading — to the point of swallowing whole its bloody brutality to its own people — on behalf of the peaceful applications of the Iranian nuclear program while in full possession of intelligence on its hidden nuclear facility not make liars of our no-more-politics-as-usual archetype-of-moral-superiority president and his finger-wagging goody-two-shoes of a secretary of state? If memory serves, withholding information for political purposes is a form of lying that sticks in the craw of lefty arbiters of morality at the Daily Dish and elsewhere, lying that at the very least must be punished by a reaming involving forestsful of newsprint and miles of cyberspace, if not by actual prosecution. And yet, on this very subject Mark Lynch takes reality and twists it into a pretzel of pro-Obamic sycophancy:
Seriously? Russia is considering sanctions? That’s interesting. Will Lynch now twist the Russian president’s “I do not believe sanctions are the best way to achieve results. . . . I think we should continue to promote positive incentives for Iran and at the same time push it to make all its programs transparent and open” inside out to mean its opposite? (Even Andrew Sullivan isn’t sure we have the nod of the Russki.) More important, does Lynch really believe “the credibility of the threat of tough sanctions” will lead to Iranian concessions? Or is he just hoping that if only he and his Obama-worshiping confederates say it often enough it will come true? How many years of failed sanctions is it going to take to force our foreign policy establishment to admit that the mullahs and their basij murderers just don’t care? Appeasement has no credibility, as generations of imprisoned Russian and Cuban human rights activists will attest. As for Sullivan himself, he falls, chest heaving, down the Maureen Dowd rabbit hole, trailing that old Obamic mojo along with him:
That’s more of a threat than a promise, really. And it’s only a matter of degree, the difference between believing this stuff and wandering around the George Washington Bridge bus station in August wearing six overcoats.
