Yeah, yeah, I know -- the Iran deal has critics in both parties. But Democratic critics such as Chuck Schumer, while maddening, are at least relatively measured in their tone -- Schumer says he's "disappointed" with the deal, which, he says, "does not seem proportional." He and fellow Democrat Bob Menendez are part of a group of senators threatening further sanctions at the end of the current deal's six-month window, if certain conditions aren't met -- but it seems to me that Schumer and Menendez could be playing bad cop to their former Senate colleague John Kerry's good cop, waving the stick even as Kerry offers the carrot. It may all be part of the process of getting to a permanent deal. So they don't seem to have gone off the deep end.
By contrast, on the right we have this, from the Heritage Foundation's James Jay Carafano, at National Review Online:
Munich IIAnd then there's this, from Power Line's Paul Mirengoff:
No, that's not a facile, partisan jab. What just went down in Geneva is, in fact, a replay of the greatest diplomatic tragedy of the 20th century.
The Munich deal rested on the ridiculous notion that Hitler could be satiated. The new pact builds on the equally ludicrous idea that Iran would give up the means to build a nuclear weapon that will serve as the tip of its foreign-policy spear....
The British think the deal with Iran makes sense. Then, again, it was a British government that believed Munich meant we could all get a good night's sleep now.
The Russians laud the deal. But it was a government in Moscow that believed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact solved all its problems.
Our White House likes this deal. But, our White House also thinks its policies in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Syria have been just super....
It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to develop a working hypothesis that explains this behavior. The presumption should be that Obama and Kerry like to grant concessions to regime that don't like America because they themselves don't like America all that much.It isn't just that Democratic critics of the Iran deal are more measured in their tone. Democrats are generally more measured in their critiques, especially of Republican opponents. Senate Democrats just curtailed the filibuster, but I don't recall any of them saying that the filibuster was a tool of jackbooted fascism. (It was Republicans who compared a Democratic filibuster-curtailer to Mussolini.)
We know that Kerry didn't like America in the days when he compared our army to that of Genghis Khan. We know that Obama didn't like America in his student days, both high school and college, when his mentors were Communists.
Time presumably softened their dislike of America, converting it, perhaps, into ambivalence — the kind expressed by Michelle Obama in her more candid moments. But the byproduct of their dislike -- the desire to accommodate America's enemies -- remains manifest.
In my opinion, it provides the unifying theme of Obama's foreign policy and the main motivation for making such a bad deal with Iran.
To the right, every Democrat operating in the foreign policy sphere is Neville Chamberlain. Every Democratic policy that affects the economy came straight from The Communist Manifesto. Every liberal or moderate immigration is sovereignty-destroying amnesty.
Well, no surprise there. Right-wingers aren't grown-ups. They're overgrown children who are heroes of their own political fantasy stories. It's not enough for them to oppose a policy -- they have to persuade themselves that they're the only ones preventing the destruction of civilization as we know it. So every foreign foe is Hitler, every deviation from laissez-faire is the brutal crushing of economic freedom, every immigration proposal is the takeover of America by vicious globalists. Red Dawn isn't a movie -- it's what happens every time any non-conservative obtains any power whatsoever and dares to use it. The appropriate response to everything done by the center or right is "Wolverines!"
I don't know why the grade-school hero fantasies of conservatives are allowed to et the terms of all of our political debates. But that's how we do things.
