Medium has published Congressman Jerrold Nadler Statement on the P5+1 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

I bring to my analysis the full weight of my responsibilities as a member of Congress, and my perspective as an American Jew who is both a Democrat and a strong supporter of Israel.

With this background information it is easy enough to recognize there is enough mendacity in the full statement to sink a battleship. It is all pro-Israel, anti-Iran mendacity.

In the last 15 years, Iran has unfortunately made substantial progress in its nuclear program. Prior to the Interim Agreement in 2013, Iran had progressed to the point where it was only 1 month away from producing enough fissionable material for a nuclear bomb. The Interim Agreement forced Iran to get rid of its 20 percent enriched uranium, moving the “breakout” timeline — the length of time it would take Iran to produce enough fissionable material for a nuclear weapon — to 2–3 months. That is where Iran is now — at the threshold of developing a nuclear bomb.

As if having the fissionable material is tantamount to having a bomb and being able to deliver it. As if being able to deliver a single bomb would make any rational sense when Iran’s opponents have thousands of more bombs than Iran will ever have. Maybe i should call it hysteria rather than mendacity.

Nevertheless, Rep. Nadler comes out in favor of the Iran Nuclear deal. Imagine how well he could support the deal if he were able to think about it, Iran, and Israel more rationally.

What is truly amazing is that this statement by Nadler is mentioned in the article of my previous post Propaganda and the Iran-Nuke Deal as an example of a thoughtful analysis.

A gold standard for such education and explanation was set by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who last week accompanied his announcement of support for the agreement with a remarkably thorough 5,200-word statement giving the reasons for his decision. The statement is one of the most insightful analyses of the relevant issues to come out of Congress or anywhere else, and it is very useful reading for any citizen looking for guidance and education on the subject. Not every member of Congress can be expected to be as thorough and diligent as Nadler has been, but he has shown what can be done along this line.

Consortium News has the article Propaganda and the Iran-Nuke Deal.

For years, the anti-Iranian propaganda in the U.S. media has been unrelenting, at times aided by the idiocy of certain Iranian officials. That one-sided presentation and the ignorance that it has engendered are now adding to the public confusion about the Iran nuclear deal, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.

I post this for my own records when anybody questions my assertion about falling for propaganda against Iran. I don’t care so much how many others don’t even realize the lies they have been told and are currently still believing. If they don’t read this, there is nothing I can do about it.

Here is an interesting excerpt from the article.

The tactic also has repeatedly surfaced with what became the “24-day” issue on inspections. The provision in the agreement that was seized upon in that case has nothing whatever to do with inspection of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities, which will be subject to continuous monitoring. Even with undeclared, non-nuclear facilities the required advance notice is 24 hours, not 24 days.

As one who is quite aware of the propaganda campaign in this country to go to another war with Iran (the 1954 one wasn’t officially called a war), even I was caught up in the above propaganda a tad. I figured that the the meme had to be a misrepresentation, but I never suspected that the propagandists could make such a blatant lie as to claim 24 “days” instead of 24 “hours”.

I have subsequently read the statement touted in this article.

A gold standard for such education and explanation was set by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who last week accompanied his announcement of support for the agreement with a remarkably thorough 5,200-word statement giving the reasons for his decision. The statement is one of the most insightful analyses of the relevant issues to come out of Congress or anywhere else, and it is very useful reading for any citizen looking for guidance and education on the subject. Not every member of Congress can be expected to be as thorough and diligent as Nadler has been, but he has shown what can be done along this line.

See my subsequent post on this Congressman Jerrold Nadler Statement on the P5+1 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It is amazing that a guy who says:

For years, the anti-Iranian propaganda in the U.S. media has been unrelenting

thinks this is a gold-standard of insightful analysis as opposed to some thoughtful analysis in a pit of mendacity and hysteria. This and my falling for 24 “days” that was really 24 “hours” shows how pernicious this propaganda is, even to the wary.

Consortium News has the article The Case for Pragmatism by Robert Parry.

There is always a fixation about getting rid of some designated “bad guy” even if the result is some “far-worse guys.” This has been a pattern repeated over and over again, from Libya to Sudan/South Sudan to Ukraine/Russia to Venezuela (just to name a few). In such cases, we see the neocons/liberal hawks release a flood of propaganda against some unpleasant target (Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi/Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir/Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych/Russia’s Vladimir Putin/Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro) followed by demands for “regime change” or at least punishing economic sanctions.

There is an awful tendency of the opposition party in this country to look at a bad situation, and demand that the party in power “do something”. As long as the party in power does not “do something”, they are under constant pressure from the other party. I think this is what leads to the driving force for “doing something” even if it is worse than “doing nothing”. Until a better idea is presented, sometimes “doing nothing” is exactly the something that needs to be done.

Parry also brings up some information that seems to have been neatly wiped from people’s minds in this country.

Toss into this volatile mix of a Europe seemingly close to explosion the Obama administration’s “neocon/liberal interventionist” policies toward Ukraine, where neocon holdover Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland helped orchestrate a 2014 coup to remove democratically elected President Yanukovych after he was demonized in the U.S. mainstream media as corrupt.

In sum total, Robert Parry makes the case against what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promoted, and he doesn’t even mention her by name or by office. He also makes the case for a foreign policy that Bernie Sanders might get behind if it weren’t so politically dangerous to do so. Even Bernie Sanders has his limits on how much he dares tell the American public that has been infected by the oligarchs propaganda for so long.

I shouldn’t leave you hanging without at least a little taste for what Robert Parry sees as solutions.

So what can be done? As dark as the gathering economic storm may be, one silver lining could be that Americans and other Westerners will finally begin pushing back against the powerful neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist fellow-travelers.

Perhaps, instead of President Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal being a one-off affair that may barely survive a determined neocon assault in the U.S. Congress, it could become a model for pragmatic approaches to other international crises. The core of this pragmatism would be that one doesn’t have to love or even like the leadership of another country to cooperate on global concerns, whether they are economic, geopolitical or environmental.

Bernie Sanders posted the video below on his Facebook page. ICYMI means “In Case You Missed It.”

ICYMI: What we are trying to do in this campaign, and believe me it’s not easy, is to make sure this campaign is not about Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump or anybody else. This campaign has got to be about you, your kids, your parents, and your grandparents. Whether the media likes it or not, that is what we are going to stay focused on.

If Bernie Sanders only accomplishment were to get the “news” media to focus on the issues, he would have done a great service to this country. Luckily for us, Bernie Sanders can do so much more than that if he is elected President.