Welcome Back, Carter

Somebody cue up "My Sharona" or "Le Freak." Apparently it's 1979 all over again.

Rather than offering any crumbs of support to the Iranians who are literally putting their lives on the line for their own freedom, Barack Obama could only manage "deep concerns." In Obamaland, it's not as important to offer even moral support to people trying to shake off the yoke of a barbaric dictatorship as it is to not appear to be "meddling."

This all sounds quite familiar, and everyone over 30 has seen it before. Did somebody replace the "community activist" with a self-righteous peanut farmer while we weren't looking?

The fantasy that "moderates" within the mullah regime can be coaxed into a "grand bargain" has taken in better men than Barack Obama, but Obama doesn't even have the excuse of not being aware of that prior history. The level of self-loathing an American has to possess to believe that the Khomeinists are a brutal, terror-supporting regime entirely because the US hasn't been nice enough to them is pretty staggering.

Khoemeini and his heirs were and are brutal fanatics. Period, dot. They have subjugated and terrorized their own people and done their level best to kill ours for thirty years because that's what they are and that's what they do. The devil didn't make them do it. There's nothing you or I or Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush or Barack Obama ever could have said that would have changed them. The idea that we'd burn some kind of bridge with Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs behind him is laughable--those guys are never going to be anything other than hostile to us, and Obama ought to be realistic enough to understand as much.

Unfortunately, Obama spent far too much time marinating in Leftoid academia, and invested too much of his political persona in the self-aggrandizing mantra, "Everybody hates us because of Bush" to be able to comprehend the significance of what's going on in Iran right now. It's not about us.

The reign of the ayatollahs in Iran has an expiration date, and the ayatollahs know it. Seventy percent of Iran's population wasn't even alive in 1978, and they've had enough of the mullahs and their Basij bully boys. Whether their yoke is thrown off in 2009 or in 2012 or 2020, it's going to happen, probably within the next decade or so.

I hope any sane person would agree that sooner would be better, but here's a question for all of those who are eaten up with concern over "what will they think of us?" Whenever the turn comes, what exactly will they think of us, if we turn our backs on them today? What will they think if we just hedge our bets against the ludicrous idea that we might be burning (nonexistent) bridges with the mullahs otherwise?

I've meet a lot of Eastern Europeans who have pictures of Ronald Reagan on their mantles. They never forgot the way he stood up for them, in public, against the commissars. Iran's population is going to run off the mullahs one of these years, hopefully this year. When that happens, what do you want them to remember, that we were supporting them, or worrying about what their oppressors would think about it?