"Or Maybe It Was Talleyrand"

This can't pass without mention, of course. Reuters:

Israel: Few months to avoid nuclear Iran

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Sunday that the world may have as little as “A few months” to avoid a nuclear Iran and called for sanctions.

"The crucial moment is not the day of the bomb. The crucial moment is the day in which Iran will master the enrichment, the knowledge of enrichment," she said on CNN’s "Late Edition."

Livni, whose country is the only Middle East power possessing nuclear weapons, said she did not want to identify a point of "No return" in the controversy over Iran’s nuclear program.

The Iranians, she said, "Are trying to send a message that it’s too late, you can stop your attempts because it’s too late. It’s not too late. They have a few more months," She said.

Got that? It's the Iranians who are trying to convince the world that it's too late, according to Ms. Few Months.

Here's another knee-slapper that caught my eye. Glenn Reynolds writes:

The loss of momentum in the war reminds me of something that I believe Napoleon (or maybe it was Talleyrand) said: "You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them." Much of the problem in Iraq comes from Iran, and we seem curiously unwilling to do much about it. I wonder -- does Iran already have nuclear weapons, and are we being successfully blackmailed?

Look, it's long past time to take the kid gloves off with this crap. There's too much at stake. Some of the invective and mindless hysteria out there is on par with the likes of Chavez and Ahmadinejad in tone (but not content, of course). If government officials in the U.S. or Israel or anywhere else insist on claiming it's five minutes to midnight with Iran, they need to be called what they are: desperate, dangerous rogues. If amateurs and dilettantes from the commentariat want to make similar claims, or suggest without elaboration the possibility of nuclear blackmail, or prattle on breezily about Churchillian courage and modern-day Hitlers, they deserve relentless ridicule. Incidentally, while admittedly I don't read him often and I realize he has a large following, I've never quite "gotten" Glenn Reynolds. His blog is little more than a slapdash linkfest cobbled together by intimations ("hmmm..."), one-liners, and approving winks to others, and I've been totally unimpressed by the few longer pieces I've read. The guy seems a mile wide and an inch deep. On his bio page, Reynolds gushes that he's "interested in everything." Yep.

Expect the calling-out to pick up in this space. If that makes me seem mean-spirited, petty, or shrill, so be it.