Time to take off the gloves

For those of you who are disappointed because of the President’s somewhat tepid response, to date, with respect to the events unfolding in Iran right now: What were you expecting? He’s a forty-seven yr. old man who has 4 years under his belt as the junior senator from Illinois and who has no significant piece of legislation to call his own and who cannot manage to even issue a statement on his own website condemning the murder of one of his own troops at the hands of an Islamic extremist.

Despite some encouraging signs we saw in his Cairo speech, the man has reverted to his absolute aversion to saying anything that might appear to upset the Islamic “street”.

Full disclosure: We weren’t objecting to his soft-pedaling during the early stages of this crisis but now that the mullahs have blamed the West and the U.S. for the civil unrest in Iran anyway, what’s the harm in stepping-up the rhetoric? Oh, that’s right – the Administration still harbors this delusion that we will be able to get Iran to the bargaining table over their nuclear program. This delusion is held while the Administration itself does not believe there will be any substantive change to Iran’s nuclear ambitions regardless of which Mullah-approved President is in office. So, again, what’s to lose by lobbing a few verbal hand grenades?

Peggy Noonan defends the soft-pedal here claiming that why, of course, the Iranians know “we” are with them. We’re Americans, ergo, we are for freedom.

We recall reading on the internet about liberal viewing parties of President Bush’s 2004 State of the Union address and the drinking games that were invented for the occasion where everyone would have to take a drink or do a shot each time the President said the word “freedom”. A certain disdain for the constitutional concept of freedom combined with a raging hangover the next day (boy, did Bush ever lay it on them that night) makes us thankful we weren’t liberals on that particular day.

We are an incredibly diverse nation so “freedom” means different things to different people. Having said that, it might behoove the President to step it up a notch to affirm the notion to the Iranian protesters that his definition of freedom coincides with theirs.

With Iraq now a fledgling democracy, an overthrow of the mullah-cracy in Iran would be reason to party like it was 1989.