Wednesday last the professorial and prevaricating President Obama appeared at American University before a largely Democratic audience that was cued to applaud and laugh at the appropriate times.
Purpose of the appearance was to deliver the presidential rationale for the recently signed Iran agreement. That agreement was crafted over a two-year period by Secretary of State John Kerry and other major countries. It is now up to the Congress to study the agreement, which was first run by the United Nations Security Council for approval. Since Congress has been put in a rather secondary role, members on both sides of the aisle have raised grave concerns about the plan.
It’s always interesting to watch our president when he is on TV, because he switches rapidly from his nuanced lecturer delivery to a more inflammatory and strident preacher-like delivery. In last week’s column we mentioned that the TV camera never lies. Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said about our commander-in-chief.
In last week’s appearance, President Obama was nearly a half hour late, which is his modus operandi on most of his appearances before the press. One wonders if he is so tardy when it comes to his golfing tee times.
In his long and wordy speech last week we were first treated to a history lesson in which the president cited the previous diplomatic efforts of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. Along those lines, he failed to mention President Bill Clinton, who in his time extolled the virtues of the nuclear agreement signed with North Korea. We all know how that turned out. It has often been rumored that Obama should call upon Dennis Rodman to be his special envoy to the North Korean dictator.
Probably the most egregious mistake that Obama made during his talk was when he said that Iranians shouting “Death to America” were only the hard-liners and did not represent all the people in Iran. It should be called to the president’s attention that the recently signed agreement is with those hard-liners. Among them is the supreme Leader, the Ayatollah himself, who regularly leads the obnoxious chant.
Additionally, the divisive Obama committed the most offensive insult when he said that Republicans who have voiced their objections to the deal are in “common cause” with those same hard-liners. Akin to that, when he explained how Iran’s leadership would spend the released billions of dollars in funds, he said that it would go to the entire Iranian populace, which would make their lives so much better that they would mount new efforts toward a regime change. What he failed to mention was that the money would first be filtered through the hard-liners, who are committed via mass shootings to keeping the populace under their control.
Obama reminds me of the story about the elderly patriarch who caught his young protégé in a horrendous lie. The old man said, “It doesn’t matter that you lied to me this once. It matters that I can never trust you in whatever you say in the future”.