Mostly Humor! Weinstein - Just Another Homophobic Day In Liberal Hollywood. Rayburn on Teddy.

Dagny and Blake Want To Make Puerto Rico Great Again!


Budweiser has set up a toll free number to get fans response to the NFL. They are considering reducing their sponsorship. You can call 1-800-342-5283 and press 1 to leave a message. Let the NFL know how you feel.
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Will Hollywood give Weinstein the same treatment they give Conservatives?

 And

 Noonan on why Americans own so many guns.

Probably oneo f her most disjointed oped's I have read of her's. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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GREAT TRUTHS


1. In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, 
two is a law firm, 
and three or more is a congress. 
-- John Adams

2. Giving money and power to 
government is like giving whiskey 
and car keys to teenage boys. 
-- P.J. O'Rourke, Civil Libertarian

3)The only difference between a 

tax man and a taxidermist is that 
the taxidermist leaves the skin 
-- Mark Twain

South Carolina Police Classics:

These are actual comments made by South Carolina
Troopers that were taken off their car videos:

**

1. "You know, stop lights don't come any redder than
   the one you just went through."
   **
2. "Relax, the handcuffs are tight because they're
   new. They'll stretch after you wear them a while."
   **
3. "If you take your hands off the car, I'll make
   your birth certificate a worthless document." (My
   Favorite)
   **
4. "If you run, you'll only go to jail tired."
   **
5. "Can you run faster than 1200 feet per second?
   Because that's the speed of the bullet that'll be
   chasing you."
   **
6. "You don't know how fast you were going? I guess
   that means I can write anything I want to on the
   ticket, huh?"
   **
7. "Warning! You want a warning? O.K, I'm warning
   you not to do that again or I'll give you another
   ticket."
   **
8. "The answer to this last question will determine
   whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat
   or a dog?"
   **
9. "Fair? You want me to be fair? Listen, fair is a
   place where you go to ride on rides, eat cotton
   candy and corn dogs and step in monkey poop."
   **
10. "Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my
    wife gets a toaster oven."
    **
11. "In God we trust; all others we run through
    NCIC." ( National Crime Information Center )
    **
12. "No sir, we don't have quotas anymore. We used
    to, but now we're allowed to write as many tickets
    as we can."**
13. "I'm glad to hear that the Chief (of Police) is
    a personal friend of yours. So you know someone who
    can post your bail."
    **
    AND THE WINNER IS....
    **
14. "You didn't think we give pretty women tickets?
    You're right, we don't. Sign here."++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

But then never forget what was said Speaker Rayburn about Senator Kennedy:

Beyond a doubt, the greatest statement of all was made by Democrat House Speaker Sam Rayburn at the first Congressional session after Ted Kennedy was caught, on camera, having sex with one of his aides on the deck of his yacht  ... "Ah see that the good Senatuh from the great state of Massutwoshits has changed his position on off-shore drillin'."
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What happened in Las Vegas is tragic.  It also gives liberals an opportunity to obsess over gun ownership

I find it interesting that far too often liberals are concerned about things that are insoluble.  This allows them to continue to bleed knowing that there are no real answers to that of which they complain.  Guns have not changed but our culture has. For example, the largest number of deaths by guns is suicide.  I doubt all the laws we could pass relating to gun control would stop suicides.  It might change the manner of how suicides happen, ie. knives, pills over guns.

I believe suicides are caused by two main reasons:

a) Fear guns will be taken away and you will have to resort to suicide by cutting your wrists and b) Men lose closet space because their wives need more room for their shoes.
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In December, I believe Trump is visiting China. We all know Trump does not like being attacked and has a "uge" ego and loves having his feathers preened.   We also know he does not like being taken for a ride and suckered.

Therefore, what happens if he finds out the Chinese have been playing him  like a fiddle and really have been helping N Korea all along while telling  him otherwise.

Also, everyone knows Trump cannot tell the truth or speaks off the cuff and exaggerates. Because of this when he tells it like it really is, like recently reminding Tillerson the last 25 years should have convinced us we cannot trust N Korea, everyone thinks he is  fool and even his own Sec. of State called him a "moron" and then ducked the opportunity to deny it.

I even have a dear friend and fellow memo reader who asked me did I want my children to grow up and be like Trump and I said no I would rather they grow up and be like Hillary and black football players.

I could go on and on about what I think about what I hear, about the sickness that has infected our society but now it is time for some serious stuff. (See 2 below.)

Obama knew when he forced both Obamacare and The Iran Deal down our throats he would be hand cuffing the next president as well as Congress.  

We already know a feckless Republican Senate could not overcome their own cowardliness and soon we will learn whether, should Trump throw the Iran ball to them, they will fumble as if they have been tossed another hot potato.

Europe would rather do business than recognize Iran for what it is and our Congress is composed of a bunch of weaklings thus, making America  a pathetic house of cards.

I am bemused by those who believe Trump will get us in  a war because he is a "moron" but they do not cringe at the idea of living under the cloud of a nuclear N Korea and Iran. They honestly believe the world is safer if  the leaders of these renegade nations have their finger on red nuclear buttons than Trump.
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Dick

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1) Opinion | Op-Ed Contributor

Will Liberals Give Weinstein the O’Reilly Treatment?

By BARI WEISS 

I’ll never forget the one time I laid eyes on Harvey Weinstein outside the pages of Vanity Fair. It was at a movie premiere in Manhattan in 2014. My sister and I got up before the film started for a pre-emptive bathroom run. As we left the theater, we couldn’t avoid walking past Mr. Weinstein, who was pressed up close to a younger, much smaller man in the hallway.

Mr. Weinstein was inches from the younger man, pointing fingers at his face, swearing at him and threatening him. The man being berated was flush against the wall. He stood there, taking it, not saying a word.

I’d read enough profiles of Mr. Weinstein to know about his money troubles and his gorgeous wife and his boiling temper. Still, I’d never seen a person talk to another that way. It shocked me. But the most astonishing thing about it was that this happened in public — at a Weinstein-produced movie, no less. Powerful people streamed by this shameful interaction and said nothing.

As it turns out, younger, less powerful women say his bullying, predatory behavior toward them was equally unconcealed. But it took dogged Times reporters to nail down the details and they are vile.

Among the accusations against Mr. Weinstein: He asked a young Ashley Judd to watch him shower. He would lure eager female strivers into “business” meetings in his luxury hotel rooms where he’d ask them for massages. One woman warned another to wear a parka for extra protection. Assistants were expected to rouse Mr. Weinstein in the mornings and do “turndown duty” at night. He seemed to be in bathrobes or naked as often as Hugh Hefner. According to The Times, he paid settlements to “at least” eight women who have accused him of sexual harassment.

If the Weinstein story follows the pattern recently laid down by Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, it’s a decent bet that “at least” will be followed with many additional allegations. The question is whether Mr. Weinstein, as a liberal lion of Hollywood and prominent donor to Democratic politicians, will suffer the same consequences as those Fox News troglodytes Mr. Ailes and Mr. O’Reilly.

If past is prologue, perhaps not. As Camille Paglia noted in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, prominent feminists like Gloria Steinem didn’t waste any time discarding sexual harassment guidelines when it came to Bill Clinton’s sexual predations as president. Principle rapidly gave way to partisanship and political opportunism.

Mr. Weinstein clearly understands this calculus. In the wake of the Times report, he issued a cringe-inducing apology: “I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then,” as if in the good olde days of the women’s liberation movement it was totally acceptable to ask a 20-something colleague to bathe you.

He promises “to do better” and “conquer my demons.” He misquotes Jay-Z. He says he has hired a team of therapists to “deal with the issue head on.”

But the real heart of his message was that he will be an even better progressive if given a second chance: “I’m going to need a place to channel that anger so I’ve decided I’m going to give the N.R.A. my full attention.” He’s also making a movie about Donald Trump.

And if the virtue-signaling isn’t enough, the man who has bankrolled Barbara Boxer, Charles Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand — the list goes on and on — is determined to pay out much more. “One year ago, I began organizing a $5 million foundation to give scholarships to women directors” at the University of Southern California, he said, adding, “It will be named after my mom and I won’t disappoint her.” Perhaps, like Mitt Romney, he has “binders full of women” to fill those slots.

Several Democratic politicians, including Ms. Warren, have already announced that they are planning to donate Mr. Weinstein’s campaign contributions to charity. But some women seem prepared to go along, at least for a price. Take Lisa Bloom, the feminist superlawyer who represented many of Bill O’Reilly’s victims at Fox. “When women speak our truth the old world shatters,” she tweeted this year. “We slayed the dragon.”

But now Ms. Bloom is trying to train her own dragon: Harvey Weinstein. “I’ve asked Lisa Bloom to tutor me,” Mr. Weinstein writes in his letter. “I hope that my actions will speak louder than words and that one day we will all be able to earn their trust and sit down together with Lisa to learn more.”

It would be interesting to know how much earning Ms. Bloom expects to do with that learning. I’m guessing her tutoring doesn’t come cheap.

Mr. Weinstein knows the ways of Hollywood well enough that he might get away by acting out his part in this clichéd repentance script. Or, at 64, he may have played out his last cards. Either way, what’s telling is that Ms. Bloom and his other advisers seem to believe their best chance of salvaging their damaged client is, like the Catholic Church of yore, to pay for his sins in the coin of liberal affirmation. The behavioral issues will take time.

In her interview, Ms. Paglia noted that, in the case of Mr. Clinton, “Hypocrisy by partisan feminist leaders really destroyed feminism for a long time.” She might have added that it also helped Donald Trump get elected. Here’s hoping the outspoken feminists who have been chummy with Mr. Weinstein, Meryl Streep and Michelle Obama chief among them, don’t make that mistake again by giving the grotesque Mr. Weinstein a pass.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is a staff editor and writer in The Times Opinion section.

1a) The Culture of Death—and of Disdain

Why do Americans own so many guns? Because they don’t trust the protected elites to protect them.

By Peggy Noonan

When news broke at Christmastime five years ago of what had happened at Newtown a friend, a news anchor, called and said with a broken voice: “What is the word for what we feel?” I thought for a moment. “Shattered,” I said. “We are shattered, all of us.” When people in ensuing days spoke of what had been done to the little children in the classrooms, I’d put up my hands and say no, we can’t keep putting those words in the air, we can’t afford it. When terrible images enter our heads and settle in, they become too real, and what is real is soon, by the unstable, imitated, repeated.

When Columbine happened in the spring of 1999, it hit me like a wave of sickness. I wrote a piece about the culture of death that produced the teenage shooters: “Think of it this way. Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar. . . . The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio; the headlines on the newsstand, on the magazines, on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by—all are waves. The fish—your child—is bombarded and barely knows it. But the waves contain words like this, which I’ll limit to only one source, the news:

“. . . was found strangled and is believed to have been sexually molested . . . had her breast implants removed . . . took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired . . . said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide . . . is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens . . . court battle over who owns the frozen sperm . . . contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women . . . died of lethal injection . . . had threatened to kill her children . . . had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself . . . protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism . . . showed no remorse . . . which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student . . .

“This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody.”

We were bringing up our children in an unwell atmosphere. It would enter and distort them. Could we turn this around?

And here is the horror for me of Las Vegas: I was not shattered. That shatters me.

It was just another terrible story. It is not the new normal it is the new abnormal and deep down we know it’s not going to stop. There is too much instability in our country, too much rage and lovelessness, too many weapons.

On television, the terrible sameness. We all know the postmassacre drill now. The shocked witness knows exactly what the anchor needs and speaks in rounded, 20-second bursts. Activists have their bullet-point arguments ready because they used them last time and then saved them in a file called “Aurora,” “Virginia Tech” or “Giffords, Gabby.”

We are stuck, the debate frozen. The right honestly doesn’t understand why the left keeps insisting on reforms that won’t help. The left honestly doesn’t understand how much yearning there is among so many conservatives to do something, try something, make it better. They don’t want their kids growing up in a world where madmen have guns that shoot nine rounds a second. Many this week at least agreed bump stocks can be banned. It probably won’t help much. But if it helps just a little, for God’s sake, do it.

But: Why do so many Americans have guns? I don’t mean those who like to hunt and shoot or live far out and need protection. I don’t mean those who’ve been handed down the guns of their grandfather or father. Why do a significant number of Americans have so many guns?

Wouldn’t it help if we thought about that?

I think a lot of Americans have guns because they’re fearful—and for damn good reason. They fear a coming chaos, and know that when it happens it will be coming to a nation that no longer coheres. They think it’s all collapsing—our society, our culture, the baseline competence of our leadership class. They see the cultural infrastructure giving way—illegitimacy, abused children, neglect, racial tensions, kids on opioids staring at screens—and, unlike their cultural superiors, they understand the implications.

Nuts with nukes, terrorists bent on a mission. The grid will go down. One of our foes will hit us, suddenly and hard. In the end it could be hand to hand, door to door. I said some of this six years ago to a famously liberal journalist, who blinked in surprise. If that’s true, he said, they won’t have a chance! But they are Americans, I said. They won’t go down without a fight.

Americans have so many guns because drug gangs roam the streets, because they have less trust in their neighbors, because they read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Because all of their personal and financial information got hacked in the latest breach, because our country’s real overlords are in Silicon Valley and appear to be moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength. And they’ll be the ones programming the robots that’ll soon take all the jobs! Maybe the robots will all look like Mark Zuckerberg, like those eyeless busts of Roman Emperors. Our leaders don’t even think about this technological revolution. They’re too busy with transgender rights.

Americans have so many guns because they know the water their children swim in hasn’t gotten cleaner since Columbine, but more polluted and lethal.

The establishments and elites that create our political and entertainment culture have no idea how fragile it all is—how fragile it seems to people living normal, less privileged lives. That is because nothing is fragile for them. They’re barricaded behind the things the influential have, from good neighborhoods to security alarms, doormen and gates. They’re not dark in their imagining of the future because history has never been dark for them; it’s been sunshine, which they expect to continue. They sail on, oblivious to the legitimate anxieties of their countrymen who live near the edge.

Those who create our culture feel free to lecture normal Americans—on news shows, on late night comedy shows. Why do they have such a propensity for violence? What is their love for guns? Why do they join the National Rifle Association? The influential grind away with their disdain for their fellow Americans, whom they seem less to want to help than to dominate: Give up your gun, bake my cake, free speech isn’t free if what you’re saying triggers us.

Would it help if we tried less censure and more cultural affiliation? Might it help if we started working on problems that are real? Sure. But why lower the temperature when there’s such easy pleasure to be had in ridiculing your mindless and benighted countrymen?

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2) No Easy Way Out

If he decertifies the Iran deal, what will Trump do next?

By REUEL MARC GERECHT

By October 15, Donald Trump must decide what to do with his predecessor’s nuclear agreement with Iran. He has felt obliged, against his instincts, to recertify the deal every 90 days, per the requirements of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, Congress’s attempt to supervise Barack Obama’s nuclear diplomacy. The president’s senior advisers reportedly gave him no other choice. Since July, the second time he recertified the deal, the National Security Council has been working arduously to give him options. There are only three.

First, the president can do what he has reluctantly done before: certify Iran’s compliance and affirm the accord remains in the interest of the United States. According to the nuclear review act, also called Corker-Cardin after its sponsors, Tehran could be abiding by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action but the president could still find the accord, with its many deficiencies, detrimental to America’s security and thus uncertifiable. The secretaries of defense and state, the chairman of the joint chiefs, and most congressional Democrats want to maintain the status quo. It’s difficult to suss out the truth about where congressional Republicans stand, but it’s a decent guess that in the Senate a majority of Republicans would rather see the JCPOA continue than share the responsibility of downing the agreement and dealing with the fallout.

According to the review act, if the president decertifies, Congress has 60 days to restore the sanctions suspended by the nuclear deal by a simple majority vote in both houses. After 60 days, the Senate would need 60 votes to overcome a probable Democratic filibuster to restore the sanctions. The solid wall of GOP opposition to Barack Obama’s accord in 2015 appears to have cracked even though Republicans haven’t found Obama’s outreach to the Iranian regime astute, rarely hesitate to highlight baleful Iranian actions, and often dismiss the nuclear accord as a Trojan horse. If Trump certifies the agreement for a third time, after decrying its fatal flaws, the odds are high that he will keep on certifying. Certainly others, chiefly the Europeans, Russians, and Iranians, whom Trump has spooked with his fierce opposition to the deal, will no longer take Trump’s remonstrations seriously.

Door number two: The president decertifies the deal and quits waiving the statutory sanctions lifted under the JCPOA, effectively killing the agreement. The most punishing of fiscal sanctions, which basically stopped the world’s big banks from handling Iranian commerce and investment, would snap back, derailing President Hassan Rouhani’s dreams of using European investment, technology, and heavy industry to fuel the Islamic Republic’s economic expansion. This option would oblige the president and Congress to prepare immediately for blowback from the Europeans, who really want to put the nuclear issue behind them and get on with trading with Iran. President Trump is hardly enthralled by the Western alliance, and European investment in Iran is trivial compared with European investment in the United States. But the Europeans don’t like being manhandled by Washington, especially by Trump, who is loathed by the Western European political class. Although neither the French nor the British were enamored of the way the Obama administration negotiated with the clerical regime, and the French in particular thought some of Obama’s concessions profoundly unwise, the “EU3” nuclear diplomacy that bound France, Britain, and Germany together against Tehran remains the most momentous diplomatic effort undertaken by the European Union. In European eyes, Trump wouldn’t just be trashing Obama’s legacy by leaving the JCPOA; he’d be trashing their efforts, which started in 2003. Even in the age of diminishing transatlantic fraternity, Washington instinctively would prefer not to quarrel with its oldest allies. Even the Trump White House would prefer to take a path by which it doesn’t have to listen to the Europeans whine loudly.

Far more important, however, would be the blowback from Iran. The White House and the Pentagon would have to be ready for Iran’s possible “asymmetrical” actions—to use the American term that the Iranians like to throw at us—against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. Washington isn’t prepared to handle attacking Shiite militias. The war against the Islamic State remains the guiding light of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the White House—at least the national security adviser, Lt. General H. R. McMaster, and his staff—have been seriously ruminating on how they can convert a counterterrorism-focused mission into an anti-Iran grand strategy.

It is unclear that they could do so given the confines in which they operate—chiefly, the refusal of President Trump to commit significant U.S. forces long-term in Iraq and Syria with the explicit mission of containing and rolling back the clerical regime. This contradiction in President Trump’s approach to the Islamic Republic—fierce hostility to the nuclear deal but no large, lasting commitment, which must include more U.S. boots on the ground, in Syria and Iraq—is surely in part why Mattis supports the JCPOA even though he is aware that it is deeply flawed. If you accept that American downsizing in the region will continue, if you are scarred from a recent war, fearful that the United States just doesn’t have the staying power for the Arab world, then the JCPOA is an acceptable alternative. Mattis probably believes that President Obama’s new-age hopes about Iran and America and about the need for a smaller U.S. footprint in the Muslim world are twaddle, belied by the return of U.S. forces to Iraq. But he may nevertheless accept, however reluctantly, the idea of American decline and retrenchment. Trump obviously has ingested a big slice of this twilight worldview. Walking away from the deal on October 15 just seems too ballsy for Mattis and Trump, though probably not McMaster.

Hence the appeal of door number three: The president decertifies the deal but continues to waive sanctions as required by the JCPOA, which would allow, at least in theory, the president and the Republican Congress to “fix” the deal through further diplomacy, backed up by the threat of renewed sanctions and military force. If the president chooses this option, which now seems likely, it indicates he prefers not to walk away from the accord, at least not immediately, and might want to explore the possibility of the Europeans, voluntarily or under duress, joining us in an effort to remove the debilitating deficiencies of the nuclear agreement (sunset clauses, permission to do advanced-centrifuge research, continuing long-range ballistic missile development, and a verification regime that doesn’t allow access to military sites and key scientific personnel and paperwork).

Decertification does not necessarily mean that a new round of escalating sanctions is coming. It could well mean, at least in the eyes of the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the head of its Atomic Energy Organization, MIT-trained nuclear engineer Ali Salehi, that Washington isn’t going to do much of anything at all.

Zarif and Salehi have repeatedly shown that when it comes to handling Americans and Europeans, they have clout with the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, whose deep anti-American emotions could get the better of him. Zarif and Salehi have surely already advised Khamenei to ignore all but the most serious of sanctions while waiting to see how Trump’s decision plays out in Washington and Europe. The president could decertify, and keep decertifying, while waiving the most painful sanctions. Treasury and Congress could shower Iran with pinprick designations, giving a certain spiritual satisfaction while not challenging anything fundamental and certainly not setting the stage for a military clash.

The best-case scenario: The president decertifies the nuclear deal and the administration tests the idea that major new executive-branch sanctions aimed at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has a commanding position in all the strategic sectors of the country’s economy, can freeze further Western investment in the Islamic Republic, especially in oil and gas. European investment in Iran has so far been more aspirational than real; European banks remain leery of significant transactions with the Islamic Republic. Deflating European commercial appetites will not be hard for the White House. Rouhani and Zarif will surely try to play the Europeans off the Americans, but the Europeans are stuck: American-European ties are continental and a trade war over the unappealing Islamic Republic isn’t going to happen. European Union rules require consensus. Eastern Europe, which still needs the United States as a protector against Russia, will definitely not consent. This is true even if President Trump takes down the $12.5 billion Airbus deals with Iran, which would inevitably happen if he decides to kill the $17 billion Boeing sale to Tehran, because of American parts in Airbus planes. The president would, however, continue to waive sanctions as under the JCPOA, stating clearly that this is a temporary endeavor, that he will allow the full force of American sanctions to return within a year if Tehran does not agree to rectify the omissions in Obama’s nuclear agreement. The president would also make clear that he is fully prepared to use military force to destroy the clerical regime’s nuclear infrastructure.

Republican senator Tom Cotton’s recent speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington in support of decertifying the deal was important precisely because he didn’t run away from the military option. Most Republicans do. If economic coercion is going to work, if it is possible to oblige the Iranians peacefully to give up what Obama allowed them, it will require a credible military threat. Sanctions, for all their utility in a globalized world run with U.S. dollars, cannot guarantee that the Islamic Republic’s economy will crash so as to enfeeble nuclear progress permanently. If Trump isn’t prepared to back up economic coercion and diplomacy with a promise to use the military against Tehran should the supreme leader attempt to accelerate the atomic program, then Washington will be right back where Obama was and abandoning the JCPOA will have made no sense. The odds of Khamenei and the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards buckling aren’t brilliant, but the clerical regime remains fundamentally fragile, as was most recently demonstrated in 2009-2010, when the pro-democracy Green Movement nearly cracked the theocracy through massive street demonstrations. Getting Tehran to forsake its atomic ambitions, which have been at the center of Iranian defense policy since the 1990s, will require the Trump administration and Congress to convince the mullahs and senior guardsmen that a dark future awaits. Threatening our foes with military responses was the bread and butter of America’s Cold War containment strategy. That the Cold War approach seems outdated if not wrong for so many in the political and foreign-policy elite only shows how far America has traveled since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became long and difficult.

The worst-case scenario with door number 3: The president decertifies but waives sanctions as under the JCPOA, Congress doesn’t force any tougher response, the White House hits Iran with relatively minor sanctions, which Zarif and Salehi persuade Khamenei to ignore, and Trump allows Obama’s license for the Boeing sale to stand, thus also allowing the Airbus deal, too. For the third option to be dissimilar from what Trump has done before—certifying the agreement—he must be prepared to walk away from the deal, which he wasn’t in April and July. Door number three is only fundamentally different from door number one if Trump is primed to pull the trigger, economically and if need be militarily, after a clearly specified period of time. Otherwise, this choice is an invitation to endless negotiations with Iran and the Europeans—and the Iranians, fearful that Trump might bomb them, will probably be willing to engage the United States on supplementing the JCPOA so long as no timeline is given and sanctions aren’t ramped up. Zarif and Salehi aren’t fools: They know the peaceful promise of diplomacy can tie up Westerners endlessly. Needless to say, there would be a large chorus in Europe and in the United States, even perhaps inside the president’s cabinet, thrilled to see Trump’s rebellious option become just a variation of continuous certification.

We will know that Trump is moving in this direction if we see him approve the Boeing deal and ask Republicans in Congress to rewrite the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act so he doesn’t have to certify the agreement at all or only infrequently. Needless to say, Republicans should refuse. Foreign affairs isn’t an easy bailiwick for Congress to work its will. Annoying the executive branch, however, has a long and distinguished bipartisan pedigree. Republicans in Congress have to work up the will to break with Obama’s foreign policy. Trump is right about Iran and the nuclear deal. For him and all those who so strenuously opposed Obama’s nuclear diplomacy, being right, though, isn’t enough.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a contributing editor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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