Hot new meme from the White House: Iran will be "straight outta uranium" thanks to this nuclear deal

Read this BuzzFeed post if you’re not in on the gag. There’s a biopic coming out about the rap group NWA called “Straight Outta Compton” and people on social media have started photoshopping the poster to do their own “straight outta” riffs. Our leaders, ever eager to find a way to reach The Kids, thought this would be a fine vehicle with which to sell young adults on the most momentous development in American foreign policy since the Iraq war. And I’m reluctant to mock them for that assumption, frankly. They get paid to know what works and what doesn’t among the young adults who helped twice elect Obama. This bit of idiocy really might be the most efficient way to shift twentysomething opinion towards the deal.

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But let’s lay aside whether this is maybe too lighthearted a way to treat a debate that’ll decide whether Shiite fanatics end up with nuclear weapons or whether we bomb a country of 77 million people to stop them. (A “Straight Outta Time!” meme promoted by the Bush White House to mock Saddam in 2003 would have gone over well with our intellectual betters.) Let’s ask instead: Is this even true?

They’re not going to be out of uranium after the deal. They do need to sharply reduce their current stockpile and cap it at 300 kilograms (660 pounds) for the next 15 years; they’re also barred from enriching it beyond 3.67 percent purity, leaving it far short of the 90 percent purity needed to make a bomb. But they’ll continue to spin 5,000 centrifuges known to the IAEA, along with whatever ones they manage to set up in secret for bomb work. Proliferation expert Alan Kuperman wrote two months ago in the NYT that depending upon how much of Iran’s already enriched uranium is kept in solid form and how aggressive they are in their cheating, they could maintain a “breakout” period of as little as three months. Besides, even if you think 300 kilograms is close enough to zero to qualify for being “straight outta uranium,” the gaping hole in the deal is that the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program begin to ease 10 years from now. Come the end of the next decade, they’ll have high-tech centrifuges online capable of spinning up a nuclear core from far smaller amounts of uranium than are needed now. They’re “straight outta uranium” for the next decade — at which point we’ll be straight outta time and straight outta options, thanks to our schmuck president.

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Speaking of which, despite the best efforts of Smart Power to meme-ify their way out of this mess (Democrat Jon Tester announced he’ll be voting for the deal this afternoon, leaving opponents pretty much straight outta “no” votes), the public knows a stinker when it sees one: Obama’s job approval on handling Iran is at 33/55 in Gallup right now thanks to unusually lukewarm support from his own party.

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Here’s the mastermind behind the deal warning MSNBC that Congress must back it or else the Shiite fanatic with whom we’ve been negotiating might find us undependable. If you take Kerry’s logic seriously here, that the United States should never go back to the bargaining table once the president’s reached an agreement with a foreign power for fear of losing leverage, then the Treaty Clause in the Constitution shouldn’t exist. Giving veto power to the Senate over treaties forces the president to either abandon an agreement he supports or to restart negotiations after the two sides thought they had reached a deal. How terribly unfair to Iran’s terrorist regime, or any other power, if the American people’s representatives pulled that on them.

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Stephen Moore 8:30 AM | December 15, 2024
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