Thursday, August 6, 2015

Disoriented, they know not what they want

Let me tell you something, my friend. Go to court, obtain an injunction to freeze someone's bank account on the basis that you have a claim against that person – a claim that needs to be resolved before he can have the money back in whole or in part depending on the judgment.

Now imagine that you go through a reconciliation process with that person, and the claim is resolved without you being rewarded any of the money. Would you then go back to the injunction judge and ask him to maintain the injunction on the basis that the person is an SOB who will use the money to do bad things? Well, you may try, but you'll be laughed at in the courtroom, if not laughed out of town altogether.

This is exactly what some people, including the editors of the Wall Street Journal, are asking for. To explain their reasoning in the court of public opinion, the editors wrote a piece that came under the title: “Cash for the Revolutionary Guards” and the subtitle: “The nuclear deal is a financial windfall to Iran's military wing.” The piece was published on August 6, 2015 in the Journal.

To make their views stick – at least as to the notion that the Iranians are SOBs – the editors of the Journal begin their presentation by ascertaining that it is an “immoral equivalence” for President Obama to have drawn an equivalence between, on the one hand, the hardline members of the Republican Party in Congress who reject the nuclear deal just concluded with Iran ... and on the other hand, the hardline Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Tehran who may be opposed to the deal.

Coming out a bout of what must have looked to them like a heavy-duty mental exercise, the editors of the Journal seem so badly disoriented, you wonder why they decided to continue with the presentation rather than start by taking a short rest (or a nap) to gather their wits. Well, they did not take a rest, and what follows is the result: “In truth, Mr. Obama isn't trying to persuade anyone. He's trying to keep enough partisan Democratic support across the country...”

Did you get that, my friend? The editors of the Wall Street Journal are saying that President Barack Obama is trying to persuade nobody – just trying to persuade enough of those nobodies who would be his partisan Democratic supporters across the country. So now, you must ask yourself: If these are worthless nobodies in the eyes of the editors, who might turn out to be their worthy somebodies?

And while they are at it, they see another Obama equation that causes them to bristle. It is this: “to equate opposition to his deal with a vote for war in Iraq in 2003 and a lust for war generally.” How do they repudiate this? Well, there is a Jewish trick that has proven to work better than others. It is to assign guilt by association even if no part of the association is guilty of something. Here is what the editors did: “He [Obama] is banking on the Senate's Elizabeth Warren wing to save him...” But what has Warren got to do with this? Nothing. They just make it sound like she is guilty of something, and then rub that fictitious guilt on Obama. A very Jewish trick.

They finally get to talk about what they call “the deal's financial windfall,” which they admit is Iran's own money. Responding to Obama saying that most of that money will go to improve Iran's economy, they say: “This misjudges the regime's priorities and how its economy works.” This is like telling the injunction judge not to retract the injunction because the guy is an SOB.

To make their point, they say in essence that the Iranian economy is – to a large (20%) extent – controlled by the Revolutionary Guard Corps “the regime's military and ideological spine.” Never mind that they call Israel's 80% government controlled economy a model thing for the world to emulate, they even tolerated at one time, the idea of something like it happening in America when the chips were down. They did right after the financial meltdown of 2008 when people were suggesting the nationalization of the banks, and the Journal did not oppose it.

There is no denying that America's economy was hit hard at the time, but the Iranian economy was hit even harder, and hit for a longer period of time, by the sanctions. It was inevitable that the governing authority would intervene to keep it functioning. To come now and say that Iran's economy is badly run because it is 20% controlled by the government, is to drink from Israel's economic Kool Aid.

These editors need to take a short nap before writing on economics again.