by KenI had the radio on while President Obama announced the deal on Iran's future nuclear capability agreed to by the five permanent Security Council members, Germany, and Iran, and I listened as well as I could. My gut impression was that it actually sounded like a pretty reasonable deal, and certainly a lot better than the alternative, which is to say no deal, where the only real check against Iranian nuclear aspirations is war -- which in the end is very likely the outcome desired by U.S. critics of the deal, who are so stupid and uninformed as to have no conception of what such a war would actually entail.Now that doesn't mean I think this is a "good" deal. Honestly, I don't know. From the president's presentation, it seems to encompass more of the realities of the situation, including the conflicting agendas of the various parties to the deal, than I would have thought possible. But hey, I don't know.I would welcome some real discussion of what has been agreed to -- including the fairly limited (as I understand it) areas where the deal remains secret -- by people who actually know what they're talking about: what's workable in the agreement, what's not so workable, what's problematic, what we just don't know, and of course what the alternatives might be.The problem is that we can't have any such discussion without parties to that discussion who are: (a) informed, (b) honest, and (c) interested in getting to the realities of the matter. And unfortunately, among the U.S. critics, there's unlikely to be anyone contributing to the discussion who has any of these qualities.What we're getting is what I might call jenniferrubinism, hysterical braying -- an even worse deal than I imagined, a formula for Israel's suicide -- where you start with a few carefully selected facts, or factoids, ignoring the other 97 percent of the reality, and then you manipulate those factoids by starting with a predetermined conclusion and then applying the analysis that would be performed by an individual with zero functional analytical capacity. It's what I've called the right-wing ideal of the Functional Zero IQ, where you always look at the world as if your brain had no capacity to receive or process actual information.If you want cases in point, check out a piece like washingtonpost.com's "Congress greets Iran deal with skepticism." Or the nonsense coming out of the mouths of Republican presidential wannabes. (In terms of GOP presidential-candidate promises to scrap any Iran deal, Paul Waldman had an interesting "Pllum Line" take yesterday, "The next GOP president won't walk away from the Iran deal. Here's why," arguing mainly from the differences between real-world governance and crackpot campaign rhetoric.) Or for punditocratic knee-jerk gibberish there's the supposedly "reasoning" conservative Michael Gerson's "Obama’s Iran deal is a reckless bet," which would have read exactly the same no matter what the deal actually said.Amazingly, these people always wind up with the conclusion they programmed in, with no regard whatever for reality, not to mention decency, humanity, or practicality, and since the preprogrammed conclulsion is that of ignoramuses, predators, self-aggrandizing rabble-rousers, and/or outright psychopaths they will fairly reliably represent some combination of ignorance, predation, egomaniacal rabble-rousing, and/or garden-variety psychosis.the jenniferrubinists claim to be motivated by concern for the safety of Israel, but they aren't in contact with anyone who is seriously and informedlyl concerned with the safety of Israel. The only Israeli voices they hear are those of Israeli liars and psychopaths. So when they talk about this being the worst deal they can imagine, or a deal that means the suicide of Israel, it's all 100 percent unmitigated bullshit.Are there risks for Israel? Undoubtedly. Are there risks for Israel without a deal? Unquestionably. Do any of the U.S. right-wing screechers have any idea of what either of those sets of risks might be? Not as far as I can tell. All that exists in the jenniferrubinist mind is an agenda driven by bullshit.As for "Israel's suicide," these are the same patholoogically lying sociopaths who still don't seem to grasp the most basic reality about the future of Israel: that it is impossible for it to remain both democratic and Jewish. Israel is already engaged in a program of suicide unless it plans a campaign of extermination against its Arab populations -- a possibility that, I'm astonished and appalled to say, seems increasingly less impossible to me.To any serious discussion about Israel's survival, I'm not aware of Benjamin Netanyahu having ever contributed the merest syllable. He contemplates no future except as a ruthless oppressor state -- leaving open no realistic alternative except Israeli suicide or genocide.#
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