The Obama-worshipping sycophantic media always presumes his motives are pure and conservatives are crass and evil. And they just keep proving it over and over again.

The New Yorker penned this piece titled “A Calculated Risk” which lays the blame for Iran’s nuclear ambitions on Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. No kidding.

Ford’s talks failed, as did negotiations undertaken by the Carter Administration. In 1979, the Shah fell to the Iranian Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini, believing that nuclear weapons were un-Islamic, initially put Iran’s program on ice. After Khomeini’s death, in 1989, his successors bargained, smuggled, and dissembled, and by 2009 they had installed enough equipment to make a bomb within a few years. This was President Obama’s inheritance. After six years of diplomacy, capped by energetic negotiations led by Secretary of State John Kerry—who seems on some days to be the only man in Washington enjoying his job—the Administration may at last have a deal in sight, judging from recent statements made by Kerry and by his Iranian counterparts.

Ayatollah Khomeini certainly didn’t think killing hostages was un-Islamic, and Kerry (whom Jonah Goldberg called “a human toothache”) is about as enjoyable to watch as an elephant getting an enema. But I digress.

New Yorker writer Steve Koll makes his key point here.

Republicans positioning themselves for 2016 have denounced any deal. Their opportunism, abetted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s divisive address to Congress earlier this month, has made it hard for Obama to clarify his argument: the bargain may carry risks, but it is better than any practical alternative.

This is pure, unadulterated bullsh*t.

To the Left, it doesn’t matter what else is true. The narrative is paramount: Republicans are bad. Netanyahu sides with them, so he’s bad. Any motives they have must be “opportunism” or political hackery. And all of Obama’s motives are pure, lily white, and far more practical than rabid dogma.

On the rather insignificant issue of Iran cheating: Oh, bother! Those conservatives keep bringing that up…it’s just “overblown fear-mongering,” you know. Of course it is. Because fear-mongering, opportunistic, political, power-hungry Republicans advocate it, it must be false.

One risk of any deal is that Iran will cheat successfully, as it has before. Between 2004 and 2009, it built a huge centrifuge facility under a mountain south of Tehran before Western intelligence agencies found out about the deception. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran still hasn’t come clean about its long history of secret weapons work. Yet Republican fear-mongering is overblown. The technology for detecting secret nuclear activity through atmospheric and water sampling, among other methods, isn’t foolproof, but it is very good. Large-scale cheating of the sort necessary to finish a bomb, which would require enriching uranium isotopes, would carry a significant risk of detection. If caught, Iran would likely face harsher economic sanctions, if not war.

I highlighted two words: if caught. The risk is not if Iran is caught, the risk is if they’re not caught. Or at least not caught in time. And that risk is just the small issue of Israel’s existence (which the Left seems to think is not worth the time to address).

How many times does Netanyahu have to remind the world that Iran intends to use any weapon at its disposal (whether un-Islamic not not) to destroy the Jewish state? How many declarations of “death to Israel” or “wiping Israel off the map” does it take before the Left believes it? Apparently, at least one more than they’ve heard so far, because they just continue to think that the Iranian Islamofascists have rational goals—rational to good practical-thinking progressive liberals.

The Left can’t go a day without honing its tremendous skill at entirely missing the point. They act as if the only two options are (1) give Iran everything they want and lift sanctions, or (2) a shooting war. If Ronald Reagan believed that we’d all be toasting “za zdaróvye!” with cheap Dovgan vodka, or we’d be able to visit a hundred thousand graves in the Fulda Gap left over from World War III.

As Netanyahu so clearly pointed out in his address to Congress, this is a bad deal, and there’s no reason to make it. Let the sanctions stick, and even increase them. Let Iran simmer and overextend its resources, and let internal strife rise up in Tehran. Keeping the status quo is infinitely better than the “calculated risk” of these negotiations.

This isn’t some egghead game where the stakes are bragging rights. It’s the survival of our greatest democratic ally in the Middle East.

“Yesterday an Iranian general brazenly declared, and I quote, ‘Israel’s destruction is nonnegotiable,’” Netanyahu began, referring to a statement by Mohammad Reza Naqd, the commander of the Basij militia of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. “But evidently, giving Iran’s murderous regime a clear path to the bomb is negotiable,” he said. “This is unconscionable.”

But to the Left, Netanyahu, like Rep. Tom Cotton, Sen. Ted Cruz, Speaker John Boehner, and all the conservatives calling this deal a steaming pile of dog crap, are just being opportunistic.

(crossposted from RedState.com)