Rescue workers gather outside a damaged residential building as residents collect their belongings from the rubble in Tehran on March 12, 2026. AFP via Getty Images We’d like to believe that the negative coverage of the Iran war so rampant in the media is simply more Trump Derangement Syndrome, but it’s plainly also about how the president’s firm actions expose how pathetically the same elites applauded President Barack Obama’s misbegotten Middle East policies, and not just his sad nuclear deal with Tehran.
To simplify things, consider The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the dean of elite liberal political analysis, who’s actively sneering at the joint US-Israeli effort to defang an entity that for five decades has called them “The Great Satan” and “The Little Satan.”
“Both Washington and Jerusalem are making claims about ‘imminent’ threats that require ‘preemptive’ strikes,” he huffs, “but we should dispense with such statements: Iran is not presenting immediate danger to the United States or Israel.”
No, because the two nations took out Tehran’s nuclear program last year, as it was weeks from producing usable weapons, and they’ve acted before it could rebuild its defenses and offensive conventional forces to shield it as it recovered that capability.
The imminent threat was to become too tough to take out.
And Iran’s lunatic bombing of almost every country now within its range proves that it was and is a threat to the entire civilized world: Just imagine it with the long-range missiles and nukes that it never stopped developing.
But of course Jeff Goldberg was one of Obama’s chief media sycophants
He asked Obama how he could possibly understand the Iranian regime as both thoroughly antisemitic and “practical,” “responsive to incentive” and “rational” — and accepted without question Obama’s blithe reply that “the fact that the supreme leader is antisemitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”
What poppycock: Those “other considerations” centered on a determined drive at regional domination and a certainty that going nuclear was the only sure way to ensure the regime’s survival.
Obama & Co. simply fantasized that a mature Islamic Republic would happily become a normal power if bribed sufficiently — and fanboys like Goldberg swooned.
The 2015 Iran deal lifted sanctions that had the regime on the rocks, instead delivering it hundreds of billions of dollars in exchange for nuclear inspections and theoretical limits on enriched uranium.
And those restrictions would have expired on set deadlines, with the larger deal then completely legitimizing Iran going nuclear.
At best, it kicked the can down the road a decade or two, at the price of drastically boosting the threat in the meantime.
Rather than normalize, Iran used Obama’s cash bath to flow funds to its regional proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis and bolster Bashar al-Assad’s brutal grip on Syria.
Of course, Obama’s media cheerleaders similarly supported his decision to abandon his red line in Syria, papering over that regime’s atrocities against its citizens — which led to a four-year civil war, millions of refugees flooding Europe and then the rise of ISIS, which is still inspiring mass-murder attempts on American soil.
These deep thinkers are now pushing President Donald Trump to end Epic Fury before finishes.
Meanwhile, European powers are spinning out because the oil-price spike has again exposed their deep dependence on foreign energy. Having sacrificed their own economies to the climate cult, they’re still funding Putin’s war in Ukraine by buying Russian energy, and would surely kowtow to Iran if only it would let the oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz.
Set aside radicals like Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, and even rabid anti-Trumper Sens. Chris Murphy (Conn.) and Chris Van Hollen. Supposed centrists such as Sens. Jack Reed, Jeanne Shaheen and Mark Warner are signing on to suggestions that US forces may be complicit in war crimes.
And while New York’s own Sen. Chuck Schumer — the self-proclaimed “guardian” of Israel — admits that “confronting Iran’s malign regional activities, nuclear ambitions, and harsh oppression of the Iranian people demands American strength,” he falls back on quibbles that Team Trump hasn’t provided “the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat.”
Once, both parties would unite behind the troops at times of military action.
It’s fine to disagree about war aims and strategy. But the Democrats’ attacks now — on efforts aimed at fulfilling both parties’ acknowledged belief in a nuke-deficient Iran — are a disgrace for the ages.
