What was Obama saying just a couple of days ago?
President Barack Obama said Saturday that partisan wrangling over the emerging nuclear agreement with Iran and on other foreign policy matters has gone beyond the pale, singling out two senior Republican senators for particularly harsh criticism. “It needs to stop,” he declared.
Obama complained that Sen. John McCain of Arizona had suggested that Secretary of State John Kerry’s explanations of the framework agreement with Iran were “somehow less trustworthy” than those of Iran’s supreme leader.
“That’s an indication of the degree to which partisanship has crossed all boundaries,” an exercised Obama said in a news conference at the end of the two-day Summit of the Americas. “And we’re seeing this again and again.”
Well Praise The Lord! Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have come together, put partisanship aside and “resolved key differences on the bill regarding Iran’s nuclear plan.”
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker said Tuesday that negotiators had reached a bipartisan agreement on legislation allowing Congress to review a final nuclear deal with Iran.
“What I’m most proud of is we’ve kept the pure integrity of the process in place and the President cannot lift, while Congress is reviewing this, cannot lift the congressionally mandated sanctions, which is what they’ve been trying to do and push for over the past couple of weeks,” Corker told reporters as he headed into a classified briefing on the emerging Iran agreement with Secretary of State john Kerry and other top administration officials.”While Corker said that “no one should ever count their chickens before they hatch,” he expressed optimism that when the bill comes up for a vote in the committee later Tuesday it would pass, as expected.
This means that passage of the bill through the chamber is more or less certain and they may even have enough votes to override President Stompyfoot’s veto.
The bill also requires the President to make a series of detailed reports to Congress on a range of issues, including Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missiles work, and its support for terrorism globally, particularly against the U.S. and its allies.
Obama commanded that the partisanship stop, and by Jove – it stopped!
Maybe it was all the grubering?
Mark Thiessen thinks so:
Remember Jonathan Gruber, the Obamacare architect who as caught on tape boasting how the president had taken advantage of the “stupidity” of American voters to pass his health-care law?
Well it seems, Obama is applying the “Gruber Doctrine” once again — this time to foreign policy.
The Gruber Doctrine is based on the premise that, in the words of the now infamous MIT professor, “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” and that the “basic exploitation of the lack of . . . understanding of the American voter” is “really, really critical” for enacting your preferred policies.
That is precisely what Obama is doing when it comes to Iran and Cuba.With Iran, the administration is once again relying on a “lack of transparency” to ram through its nuclear deal. Even Iran’s foreign minister dismissed the administration’s talking points describing the framework agreement as “spin.” Obama is warning that the only alternative to his deal is “another war in the Middle East ,” even though he has yet to reveal the key details: Will sanctions relief be front-loaded, as Iran insists, or will sanctions come off gradually, as the Iranians meet certain performance benchmarks? Will there be any transparency into Iran’s past secret nuclear activity, information that is critical to verifying its compliance today? Will there be “snap inspections” and access to all Iranian facilities, both civilian and military? Iran says no.
Obama is counting on the fact that Americans won’t be able to follow all the details about “centrifuges” and “domestic enrichment capacity.” He won’t share the details but wants us to trust him that there will be “unprecedented verification.” If you believe that, you probably still think that if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.
Last week, your humble bloggress was probably the first pundit to note that with these Iran negotiations, Obama was putting the Gruber doctrine to work on a world-wide scale.
UPDATE:
PJ Media: Unanimous: Senate Committee Gives Bipartisan Approval to Iran Bill
PJ Media: Inside the Kerry Briefing of ‘Skeptical and Quiet’ Senators on Iran Deal
Nice Deb 