I’m going to need some time to adjust to the reality that ObamaCare won’t be the biggest pile of sh*t in O’s legacy.

Remember those whispers we heard last month about secret side deals between the UN and Iran regarding nuclear inspections? Turns out they’re secret for a very good reason.

[T]he agreement [between the UN and Iran] diverges from normal inspection procedures between the IAEA and a member country by essentially ceding the agency’s investigative authority to Iran. It allows Tehran to employ its own experts and equipment [at Parchin] in the search for evidence for activities that it has consistently denied — trying to develop nuclear weapons…

The document suggests that instead of carrying out their own probe, IAEA staff will be reduced to monitoring Iranian personnel as these inspect the Parchin site…

That wording suggests that — beyond being barred from physically visiting the site — the agency won’t even get photo or video information from areas Iran says are off-limits because they have military significance.

IAEA experts would normally take environmental samples for evidence of any weapons development work, but the agreement stipulates that Iranian technicians will do the sampling.

The sampling is also limited to only seven samples inside the building where the experiments allegedly took place. Additional ones will be allowed only outside of the Parchin site, in an area still to be determined.

So that’s why the White House’s agreement with Iran was conspicuously silent about Parchin. Turns out there was a complete cave to Iran on that already in the works courtesy of Iran’s side deal with the UN. If you’re wondering how often a country suspected of covertly working on a bomb is allowed to report on its own facilities, without the IAEA conducting independent inspections, former UN inspector OIli Heinonen told the AP he’d never heard of such a thing in all his time at the agency. This capitulation, essentially putting Iran on the honor system, is totally unprecedented. Heinonen, incidentally, is also the guy who raised alarms last month when it came out that Iran’s deal with the U.S. would give them 24 days potentially to clean up a site where secret nuclear work is suspected before the UN is allowed entry. That’s more than enough time to cover your tracks, said Heinonen, if the site is small, as is likely to be the case with Iran’s attempts at cheating. In other words, we have one of the world’s foremost experts on nuclear weapons programs telling western media that the enforcement provisions of the deal are a sham.

And Congress knows all about this — I think. Remember this clip from Kerry’s testimony before the Senate last month? Jim Risch mentioned at one point in questioning Kerry that he couldn’t believe the UN would be forced to rely on soil samples provided by Iran instead of gathering its own samples to test for traces of uranium. Bob Menendez was taken aback by that; could that possibly be true, he asked? At that point, Kerry told Menendez that he couldn’t talk about it publicly but that his questions would be answered in a classified briefing. Bob Corker then chimed in to say that he’d already had the briefing and that Kerry was right that it would answer Menendez’s question. And now here’s the AP confirming that not only will the UN have to make do with samples provided by the accused cheaters themselves, it’ll have to submit to Iran’s authority over various other aspects of inspections. Which raises the question: Why is this a secret? I could understand keeping it under wraps if the secret side deal amounted to a huge capitulation by Iran; in that case, you’d want to keep it out of the media so that Iran’s hardest fanatics don’t revolt against the deal as a national humiliation. But in reality, the side deal is a huge capitulation to Iran. What reason is there to keep it classified except to spare Obama and his European partners some enormous political difficulty in selling this deal to the suckers in their electorates?

The only non-political explanation I can come up with is that the west didn’t want other countries to know that Iran got such a sweetheart deal or else other rogue regimes with their eyes on nuclear weapons will demand the same sham inspection policy. That’s the state of Smart Power circa 2015: Keep the current capitulations a secret to reduce the need for future capitulations. Exit quotation from Dan McLaughlin:

Watching the Iran deal & how it is being sold to Congress explains volumes about the level of cynicism & disillusionment that gave us Trump.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) August 19, 2015

Update: Impeach.

Statement from Obama administration on report that Iran will be able to inspect Parchin site pic.twitter.com/O9RaMsSGiQ

— Sam Stein (@samstein) August 19, 2015