Monthly Archives: April 2015

Drop It

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President Barack Obama told Congress to be quiet regarding his “deal” with Iran over the latter’s nuclear weapons program. Now he’s sending his guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair to tell them directly.

[Secretary of State John] Kerry said he would brief House members on Monday and senators on Tuesday. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is set to take up the legislation on the same day.

The administration should be free to negotiate without interference until the June 30 deadline for a final agreement, Kerry said on CBS’ Face the Nation.

Kerry also said that Congress should “hold their fire” regarding the “deal” until it’s finalized.

The Corker-Menendez bill only would give Congress to the authority to approve or disapprove that finalized deal on an up or down vote. It wouldn’t even be relevant until there is a final deal on which to pass judgment. There’s no fire here to hold.

Is what’s being “negotiated” so fragile that enacting legislation that has effect only after negotiations have been completed would interfere with those negotiations? If that’s the case, just what is it that’s actually being negotiated, and with whom?

Oh, wait—just be quiet. Your Betters are on the job.

The Arrogance of Democrat Power

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CIA Director John Brennan had this to say at the Harvard Institute of Politics regarding the nuclear weapons deal “negotiated” with Iran:

I must tell you the individuals who say this deal provides a pathway for Iran to a bomb are being wholly disingenuous, in my view, if they know the facts, understand what’s required for a program[.]

How dare you criticize your Betters!?

Sit down, and shut up.

As The Wall Street Journal put it,

Mr Brennan’s naked public partisanship harms the CIA by making whatever it now says about Iran simply unbelievable.

But remember this in 2016.

Because, Shut Up

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President Barack Obama really doesn’t like it when folks disagree with him.

Obama said that Arizona Senator John McCain (R, AZ) had suggested Secretary of State John Kerry’s explanations of the framework agreement in Iran were “somehow less trustworthy” than those of Iran’s supreme leader.

Never mind that Kerry released a FAQ on the framework “deal” (after it had been…negotiated…and before the proposed terms had been discussed with Congress) that’s radically different from what the Iranians thought they had tentatively agreed. Released by a man who once, in public and sworn testimony, accused our military of wholesale, routine war crimes. A man who tried to avoid his home state’s luxury taxes by berthing his multi-million dollar yacht in another state. Yeah, Kerry is entirely trustworthy.

Obama also renewed complaints about the 47 Republican senators who sent a letter to Iran’s leaders saying that any deal the Iranians made with the US would not necessarily hold up after Obama has left the office.

Because telling the truth about an Executive Agreement is such a terrible thing, especially when the other party to that agreement appears to have such a deep misunderstanding of the depth and durability of it. An agreement which that self-same Kerry said in testimony before Congress was not binding because what’s contemplated is only an Executive Agreement.

Never mind, too, that Obama is pulling out all the stops to prevent Congress from passing on the agreement, which would make it a binding one.

Obama added, in the wide-eyed innocence that only he can muster

I don’t understand why it is that everybody’s working so hard to anticipate failure[.]

Maybe it’s because the thing can only fail: it in no way requires Iran to stop working toward nuclear weapons acquisition, it in no way prevents Iran from working toward nuclear weapons acquisition, it in no way has even a serious inspection régime. Of course the better policy wonk than his policy wonks knows this, which only goes to show that Obama is as trustworthy as his Secretary of State.

Obama’s rank partisanship really “needs to stop.” Oh, wait. Just shut up.

A Problem with Censorship

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[Ukraine’s] Parliament voted Thursday to ban Soviet as well as Nazi symbols here….

Lawmakers voted 254-0 in favor of the bill, which outlawed any “public rejection of the criminal nature” of the Soviet or Nazi regimes in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that was overrun by the Germans in World War II.

Their heart is in the right place.

Yuriy Lutsenko, a senior Member of Parliament with the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, added this about the legislation:

Symbols including five-pointed stars and hammers and sickles will disappear from the streets of Ukrainian cities[.]

But the USSR’s flag isn’t the only thing that uses the symbology of a five-pointed star. So do the United States flag and the European Union flag—the latter which Ukraine would like to join.

This illustrates a problem with government censorship. Leaving aside the fundamental inappropriateness of censorship by governments, it’s tough for government to censor narrowly enough to block the target without also blocking the friends.

Roll Call Votes

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Senator Bob Corker (R, TN) has a bill in his Foreign Relations Committee that would require President Barack Obama to submit the deal he’s “negotiating” with Iran concerning the latter’s nuclear weapons program to Congress for approval or disapproval. His bill is was cosponsored by a large number of Democrats, so large that a week ago, he had 64 Senate votes for its passage.

Those Democrats are disappearing faster than fog in the West Texas sun as Obama begins turning up the heat on them. In their finest Saul Alinsky fashion, though, they’re covering their fade with a move to amend and gut the bill. As Kimberly Strassel put it in her op-ed at the link,

The goal of these amendments is to render the Corker legislation useless. Yet if Republicans balk, watch for Senate Democrats to howl that the GOP is acting in a partisan fashion, or refusing to be flexible. And watch for those same Senate Democrats to then use those complaints as their pretext for voting against the legislation.

And

[I]t appears that Mr Corker’s only path to 67—if that is even possible—is to so water-down his own bill as to make it useless. Does he want a meaningless 67-vote victory? The better route is to shoot for 60, send a principled bill to the president’s desk, and force the commander in chief and his defenders to solely face the consequences of a bad Iran deal.

Indeed. And Corker should demand a roll call vote in his committee, and Republicans should demand a roll call votes on the Senate floor, both on passage and on the veto override vote.

And that information should be bruited about in the 2016 campaign season—including in the Democrat primaries.