The Republican Senator Letter to Iran

I've not blogged recently about my secret love affair with the writings of The Rude Pundit. In case you do not read his blog, you should.  It's a guilty pleasure I indulge in, despite the fact that The Rude Pundit makes his points often through very crude sexual analogies and what my mother would have called very bad language.

But...The Rude Pundit is generally spot-on with his political analyses.  You really should read him regularly.

Which brings me to today's post, based upon The Rude Pundit's post earlier this week.  Seems that last week some 47 U.S. Senators all signed a letter to Iran, pretty much sticking a shiv into President Obama's efforts to deal with the Iranians over their nuclear program.  

Here's The Rude Pundit's missive on the subject:

So 47 Republican Senators from the, well, Senate of the United States bravely sent a letter to the leaders of Iran, explaining to them how our government works with respect to treaties and other foreign policy decisions. The letter is related to ongoing talks between the Obama administration and the Iranians over its nuclear program, and, no surprise here, it contains basic misinformation about the process of ratifying a treaty. 

It's pretty goddamned insulting, too. Eleven members of the Iranian government's cabinet were educated in the United States. You can be pretty sure they know more than most of the constituents of the senators about how you negotiate an agreement with the U.S. And the senators got to see the back of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif's pimp hand in response: "I should bring one important point to the attention of the authors and that is, the world is not the United States, and the conduct of inter-state relations is governed by international law, and not by US domestic law. The authors may not fully understand that in international law, governments represent the entirety of their respective states, are responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs, are required to fulfil the obligations they undertake with other states and may not invoke their internal law as justification for failure to perform their international obligations." When the Iranian government dismisses your political propaganda as propaganda, you've failed mighty fuckin' badly.

Let's put aside the overheated talk of treason. Let's not go down the rabbit hole of wondering what would have happened if a group of Democrats had done something like this to Bush. Instead, let's say that a group of Republican elected officials from the United States did the impossible: they made the repressive, fundamentalist government of Iran look like the reasonable ones. 

I should note that I continue to find our outrage and fear at any other country's nuclear program somewhat ironic...not that we want a world full of nuclear weapons, it's just that for us to play the good cop role on this topic, well, just seems, a tad ironic.  But that's just me.