Riddle me this, oh Riddler — what do U.S. Sec’y of State John Kerry and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei have in common?
Well, a few things.
One, they’re both billionaires who didn’t earn the money themselves. Kerry married it (twice) and Khamenei evidently stole it from his people. (Khamenei is also apparently a BMW dealer, something Kerry has not tried, to my knowledge.)
Two, they both want Iran to have the bomb, but neither of them will admit it. In fact, they both say the opposite. Khamenei insists Iran is operating all those centrifuges for peaceful purposes only (never mind all the cheap oil sitting under the ground), and Kerry claims he would never allow the Iranians to have the bomb in the current negotiations (until the French said he did just that — ignoring the Arak heavy water reactor, which is a literal plutonium bomb factory).
Thirdly, they don’t much care for the state of Israel. Khamenei publicly despises the “Little Satan,” as everyone knows. Whatever he really thinks about the Jewish state, it’s the perfect convenient villain while he rips his country off and assassinates various local enemies who might threaten his empire.
Kerry, to hasten peace talks no one wants, insists Israel pull back from settlements that were already included as Israeli territory in land exchanges from umpteen previous peace proposals. He also threatens Israel with ostracism, perhaps finally to annihilate traces of his own Jewish roots that miraculously surfaced during some election campaign (shades of Madeleine Albright — what is it about these “liberals” that makes them so clueless about their pasts, animosity for ancestry.com?).
But what, you might ask, is different about the two men, Kerry and Khaemenei? The obvious — John Kerry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the USA supreme leader. That honor of course goes to Barack Obama to whom Kerry must defer as the “great moderate” Rouhani must defer to Khamenei.
Everything Kerry does is cleared through, most likely dictated by, Obama. That includes the acquiescence to the heavy water reactor in Arak and all the various comments about Israelis wrecking the peace talks while it is Israel alone that has made the real concession — releasing dozens of incarcerated murderous terrorists who had killed and maimed Israeli men, women and children over decades, sometimes in their sleep.
It is Obama too who is the one who pushes the hapless Kerry to settle with the Iranians at all costs, so that he (POTUS) can get the glory of being the “peacemaker.” Fortunately, Obamacare has so tarnished the president’s reputation — and by extension Kerry’s — that no one will believe what he says anymore. Certainly America’s partners in the so-called P5+1 negotiations with Iran must be a tad skeptical of our honesty at the moment.
And good thing too, because we do have an administration of incompetents who, while lying incessantly, have no real sense of what they want to accomplish. They don’t know and nobody else does. Obama and Kerry have a foreign policy written by Groucho Marx — “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
Unfortunately, our leaders are nowhere near as funny as Groucho, nor is Khamenei. But you have to admit the Ayatollah does have his principles — and he sticks to them. Would that we did.
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