From last November; skip ahead to about 50 seconds in. Good enough? Good enough to put this stupid, disingenuous Ahmadinejad/Khamenei distinction to rest? The great neocon fantasia about St. Barack being willing to meet with this Holocaust-denying cretin isn’t so fantastic after all, and why would it be? His whole point is that you have to be willing to meet with people you don’t like if it serves your national interest. Why the left would think Ahmadinejad is or should be exempt from that principle is unclear to me — unless you view it through the same prism of bare political expediency that’s led Obama to carve out a nonsensical exemption for non-sovereign groups like Hamas.

Expect this A’jad line of defense to disappear in short order, replaced by a new line of defense that David Petraeus himself thinks we should be engaging Iran “by use of the whole of government, developing further leverage rather than simply targeting discrete threats.” Exit question, since Obama’s all about serious policy debates: What does he propose by way of further “leverage”? We know he wants to offer carrots but what does he have in mind by way of sticks, since sanctions evidently aren’t working? Petraeus had something to say about that, too. Does Obama, or are we headed for Kennedy/Khrushchev redux?