Hard Liners, Hardening the Lines

THE IRANIAN PEOPLE, generally, want to finalize a nuclear weapons deal, lift the sanctions which are crippling their economy and destroying their living standard, and rejoin the community of nations. Many of them would quite likely prefer a less repressive, more secular, more philosophically reasonable government of their own, but this, of course, is pure speculation. Their problem is the hard liners within their government, the religious fanatics who seem to think that any deal with the west is a deal with the devil, and that it is better to die for Allah than to make peace with the enemy. The American people, for their part, are, for the most part, utterly indifferent to the question of Iranian nuclear armaments, as they are on most issues; video games and the Kardashians are far more interesting. The problem in America is that those few who have any interest at all in the matter at hand are almost all hard liners themselves, who seem to believe that Barack Hussein Obama is on the verge of recklessly selling out America's interests to an Iran which will soon be, if it isn't already, bristling with nuclear weapons, with Obama's approval. The only interested Americans who aren't hard liners justify their dovish, conciliatory approach to an aversion, of all things, to adding yet another middle eastern war to America's already long and rapidly growing list. American hard liners seem to have conveniently forgotten their own maxim that "politics stops at the border", and that the President of the United States is solely responsible for the conduct of American foreign policy, with the advice and consent of the Senate, according to the U.S. constitution. Thus they subject their Secretary of State and President to a ceaseless barrage of haranguing foreign policy criticism, even before ink has been applied to paper on any agreement with Iran. Recently, forty seven United States Senators, led by Tall Tom Cotton of Arkansas, sent a letter to the Iranian leaders, undermining Obama's conduct of foreign policy by stipulating that his word means nothing. They too seem to have either misread or conveniently forgotten the constitution, and in so doing have committed treason, or at the least have revealed themselves to be traitors, but only when a president they despise is in office. The Iranian government, quite appropriately and hummorously, told the forty seven reprobates exactly where to put their letter of interest. Interesting that Cotton and Senator Cruz of Texas, a fellow republican hard liner, attended Harvard University, but evidently not their political science classes. But, upon further reflection, what else can one expect from people who believe that the American government should be a Christian theocracy , that candidates for political office should be permitted unlimited spending on advertising, and the Internal Revenue Service and Federal Reserve Bank should be elliminated?