Insanity Abounds

The liberal blogs are trying to convince me that the field of Republican candidates are incoherent idiots who will drive this country on a course of insanity if elected, but I’m not all that convinced that there is any real degree of sanity at the helm right now.

Leon Panetta was on Face The Nation this past weekend and said that with respect to their nuclear program we must, “try to convince Iran that if, you know, they want to do what's right, they need to join the international family of nations and act in a responsible way.” That’s an amazing statement considering that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while our client state, Israel, which possesses nuclear weapons, has steadfastly refused to sign on to that agreement. Further, Iran has opened their nuclear facilities to international inspection, while Israel has not.

He went on to say that sanctions are “working to put pressure on them, to make them understand that they cannot continue to do what they're doing.” If you think about that, it reveals a certain lack of logic. If sanctions were convincing them that they “cannot continue to do what they're doing” would they still be doing it?

And what is it that they are doing that we cannot tolerate? Well on that topic he gets really confusing. “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us.”

So the “red line for us” is that we have to stop them from doing what we admit that they are not trying to do. And we have to reserve the option of using bombs for the purpose of stopping them from doing that which they are not trying to do. Probably by bombing the shit out of facilities which they don’t have.

Scott Pelley of CBS News, meanwhile condensed all of this discussion into a tiny little throwaway line at the end of a marginally related news item, saying that, “And on Sunday Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told CBS News that Iran was within one year of being able to build a nuclear weapon. Thank you, David."