SAME OLD IRAN – AT 9:52 A.M. ET:  Reality is sinking in.  We were taken to the cleaners by Iran during negotiations over the nuclear deal, and predictions that Iran would moderate have been shown to be childlike and absurd.  From the great Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest:   

Somehow all those plucky moderates elected in Iran don’t seem to be having much impact on actual decisions:

A hard-line Iranian cleric who has been in the country’s power structure since its 1979 Islamic Revolution was chosen on Tuesday to lead the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body that picks the country’s next supreme leader.

The selection of 89-year-old Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, an ultraconservative who called for the execution of opposition activists after Iran’s disputed 2009 election and encouraged Iraqis to become suicide bombers against U.S. forces in Iraq in 2003, signals the power hard-liners still wield in Iran despite a recent nuclear deal with world powers.

For those puzzled by the hardline show of strength, it’s worth taking a look back at some of the smarter commentary at the time of the Iranian parliamentary elections this winter. The White House echo chamber and the 27 year-old know-nothings that Ben Rhodes has on speed dial were gushing over the “triumph” of the moderates and spinning it as a big win for the White House policy—but those who looked under the hood saw something different. As Eli Lake put it at the time:

Beginning in January, the regime’s Guardian Council began purging any candidates who espoused the slightest deviation from the country’s septuagenarian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Candidates who favored releasing political prisoners — including the leaders of the Green Movement that many Iranians feel won the 2009 presidential elections — were disqualified. Even members of the Assembly of Experts, who had previously passed the vetting process, were disqualified. So too was the grandson of Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. To paraphrase a former top U.S. negotiator in the Iran talks, Wendy Sherman, Iranians on Friday will have a choice between hardliners and hard hardliners.

Bottom line: the much ballyhooed ‘triumph of the moderates’ was another piece of White House spin, presumably pumped into the national consciousness by those helpful folks at Ploughshares.

COMMENT:  The president owes an apology to those critics, foreign and domestic, who warned about this outcome, and were trashed by the Ben Rhodes machine.  Don't hold your breath.  Obama believes he is Divine, and divinities don't apologize. 

But we are the weaker for this president's leftist views and the way he applied them to foreign policy.  The next president will have to dig us out of this hole, assuming the American people want him to.

May 31, 2016