The out-of-control overlords of post-America

Just codified their years of patty-cake and now acknowledge this:

National Security Adviser Susan Rice said “we should expect” that some of the money Iran gets under sanctions relief as a result of the nuclear deal “would go to the Iranian military and could potentially be used for the kinds of bad behavior that we have seen in the region” on Wednesday’s “Situation Room” on CNN.

Remember the other day when I excepted from a Thomas Friedman column - the one with the "I-wish-we'd-walked-away-just-once" line - and noted that it was far from a customary LITD practice?

Well, allow me to offer an observation from another source I'm not normally predisposed to quote.  Dana Milbank at WaPo  flat-out asserts that the Most Equal Comrade's presser yesterday "was a case for weakness."

He notes Major Garrett's question about how the four Americans still languish in Iranian jails, and the MEC's testy response - and what that signals.

Garrett’s question, though loaded, was legitimate; one of those being held on bogus charges in Iran is Jason Rezaian, The Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief. And Obama’s answer was revealing: Full of Sturm und Drang, he ultimately acknowledged that the United States just doesn’t have the clout to enforce its will.
This was an undercurrent of the whole news conference Wednesday afternoon, and of Obama’s overall defense of the Iran deal. He was tough and strong, but in service of the argument that American power is limited — that this is the best deal we could get with our declining leverage. His defenders call it realism; it also may amount to ratifying retreat.

This theme permeated his remarks even as they expanded in scope:

He positioned the nuclear deal as the work of a nation trying to triage its problems in global affairs. “The argument,” he said, “that because this deal does not solve all those other problems, that’s an argument for rejecting this deal, defies logic . . . and it loses sight of what was our original number one priority, which is making sure that they don’t have a bomb.”
Broadly, Obama offered his view that “it’s not the job of the president of the United States to solve every problem in the Middle East,” and he said he couldn’t end the Syrian civil war without “buy in” from Russia and Iran. He acknowledged that the nuclear deal might mean more money for Hezbollah, but said, “Is that more important than preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? No.”

Even when the news conference took a brief detour into domestic issues — revoking Bill Cosby’s Presidential Medal of Freedom — Obama spoke of powerlessness. “There is no precedent for revoking a medal,” he said. “We don’t have that mechanism.” 

But here's the step that Milbank just won't take: The MEC is fulfilling his personal mission.  A diminished post-America has been the goal all along.  That's what he sees as his place in history - the transformation of the United States into just another of the world's pens for the cattle-masses.