It took only minutes for the right to again cast Obama as a weak, despicable appeaser and to compare Iran to — what else? — the Third Reich. From Right-Wing News:
Leftist media outlet after leftist media outlet are trotting out the word "historic". Chamberlain’s deal with Nazi Germany was historic, too.
The streetcorner pamphleteer then concedes he knows essentially nothing about the deal, but once its details are known,
we’ll have a better idea as how bad this deal is. Unless you’re Iran. Then it’s really good, at least for the hard-liners.
That last bit is deeply Freudian. Although they protest, American hardliners are positively transcendent about the nuclear accord. Because their party has no economic program to speak of — and worse, because the economy is being politically uncooperative; that is, it's improving — Republicans are eying the 2016 presidential election as a referendum on Obama's foreign policy weakness and betrayal. The administration's deal with Iran is, they believe, a gift, since diplomatic channels to negotiations were opened under Secretary of State Clinton. Presto, President Clinton might well cede Florida to all-powerful, ever-menacing Cuba, just after Iran invades and occupies the Aleutian Islands.
Obama's nuclear deal also affords the right's ubiquitous scribblers, talk-radio Limbaughs and cable-news douchebags the resplendent opportunity to freshly alarm the morons among us. Terror, fear, bugaboos and boundless humbug are what keep the right's propaganda machine humming, and its target audience palsied.
The grand irony of all this is that the propagandists' greatest fear is that they might, someday, actually retake the White House. This would be bad — bad for business, which is all the right's propaganda machine is. When they do have the White House, real catastrophes ensue. Far better to have a presidential bogeywoman scheming and plotting to return the Southwest to illegal immigrants and diabolical Conquistadors, to coddle swarthy Persians who wish only to deflower our white buds, to borrow endless bundles of Chinese yen so that we become Greeks, and in general to appease, appease, appease for the sake of appeasement, for that is what Democratic presidents do.
And if you don't believe that, then you've forsaken your civic obligations and you quite obviously don't read and embrace Right Wing News, just one of the many fountains of push-pull jiggery-pokery.
***
Why do I bother? I don't really know.
According to military experts even tactical atomic bombs are obsolete weapons. Our experts agree Israel has had hundreds of atomic weapons at the ready for decades. Portraying the government of Iran as the equal of a suicide bomber writ large is something only bed-wetting conservatives would ever buy. The right's political rantings, including Benjamin Netanyahu's, are grotesque, completely predictable and won't be taken seriously by a majority of the Congress or American people. HRC has already come out in support of the deal.
Posted by: Bob | July 14, 2015 at 10:37 AM
I really wish right-wing bedwetters would find a way to criticize this deal without dragging ol' Neville's beleagured corpse out of the ground for further floggings.
There is zero, nada, zilch, nothing in common between Munich and this agreement. If there is an argument on the merits against this agreement, I would read it with interest. But all the opponents have is "zomg appeasement!" Which makes about as much sense as me saying the cup of coffee I'm drinking right now is all that's protecting me from being struck by lightning where I sit. Total fucking nonsense.
Posted by: Turgidson | July 14, 2015 at 12:06 PM
Over at vox.com Matthew Yglesias points out that conservatives have opposed every diplomatic breakthrough since Reagan penned a deal with Gorbachev: http://www.vox.com/2015/7/14/8960653/iran-nuclear-deal-conservatives-diplomacy
Because they don't want to talk to anyone--just adopt the McCain position and drop bombs on everybody.
Posted by: shsavage | July 14, 2015 at 01:52 PM